Ursula Hegi provides a laudatory preface, but, in spite of its separately captivating moments, Pritchard’s debut (a Bakeless...
A loose-jointed first novel of a woman, from an eccentric family, whose life ends up unfocused.
Though Pritchard’s chronology is nimbly kaleidoscopic throughout, the opening sections are where we get most of the pleasures here, and learn most of what we’ll know about Ruby Jean Reese and family (“a buncha crackpots,” says a childhood friend). Both of Ruby’s parents (her father is an explosives expert) are musically educated, though her mother remains far the more flamboyant: when she can’t sleep, she goes outdoors in the middle of the night and plays her violin, neighbors looking out their windows (“We could see her . . . blue robe and long black braids. Around and around the cherry tree she’d walk . . .”). Somehow, though, less and less seems to happen—happen meaningfully—as the story goes forward from those days in the 1950s and early ’60s. Ruby’s sister Albertine is smart, studious, and amusing. A friend named Etherine is pale, sickly, and will die. Older brother Mason starts out with the promise of extraordinary talent but settles for being a pharmacist, then a drunk, finally a ruin. The feckless Ruby herself will go to college, marry three men—disaster every time—and keep on talking and talking about it to the bitter end, filling endless pages with passages about other “eccentric” or “unforgettable” places and people—friends, neighbors, husbands, herself—until, as one reads, nothing seems to pass but time. With effortful allusions to the new millennium and YK2 fears made as if to up the ante of significance by some means, the end does finally come, Ruby by then a nervous wreck, with heart palpitations, even now still finding comfort (unlike the reader) in reciting yet again her favorite words from childhood (“ASPEN, TAFFETA, WORCESTERSHIRE, NINCOMPOOP . . .”).
Ursula Hegi provides a laudatory preface, but, in spite of its separately captivating moments, Pritchard’s debut (a Bakeless Prize winner) doesn’t develop—or gain power—so much as just keep on going.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-30245-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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