Hansen’s novel isn’t a prefeminist commentary, but his awareness of 1920s gender roles gives this familiar story additional...
Acclaimed author Hansen (Exiles, 2008, etc.) revisits the Jazz Age murder plot that inspired James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.
Why take on a story that’s already been the source for a classic crime novel and film? Partly to move beyond the restrictions of genre fiction: Instead of ventriloquizing noir tropes, Hansen explores the slow path to dissolution that begins with doomed love, as well as the sexism that corseted women faced in the 1920s. The novel fictionalizes the lives of Judd Gray, a lingerie salesman, and Ruth Snyder, the wife of an art director at a Manhattan magazine, who both feel restricted in their marriages (though Hansen deliberately fogs just how abusive Snyder’s husband is). After meeting through a mutual acquaintance, the two pursue an intense affair that lasts more than a year. Their trysts speak to Hansen’s second alteration to the story: His sexual candor gives the book an eroticism and intensity that would have been unthinkable in Cain’s 1943 novel, Double Indemnity, or its film version. The sensual appeal of the affair wears off quickly, though, as Judd slips deeper into alcoholism and Snyder so despairs of her marriage that she begins to consider how her husband might be killed. Hansen brilliantly characterizes the denial and moral degradation that overtake Judd and Snyder, largely through a passive voice; the two don’t do things so much as have things done to them. Yet Hansen never makes them unsympathetic, a feat that’s particularly impressive after they have been arrested for their roles in the death of Snyder’s husband. Describing the Judd-Snyder trial and accompanying media circus, Hansen occasionally lapses into passages of flat-footed journalistic reportage, yet even the dry style serves a purpose: It brings into sharp relief the lurid and sexist coverage of the trial (which made Snyder into a predatory nymphomaniac who snared the hapless Gray), and questions how much Snyder was a victim of her times.
Hansen’s novel isn’t a prefeminist commentary, but his awareness of 1920s gender roles gives this familiar story additional power.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1755-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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