A charmer. Even the little old lady from Dubuque will like this one.
Jimmy Stewart and Ann Sheridan might have been the protagonists of this goofy postwar romance, the successor to Michigan resident Amick’s debut novel The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake (2005).
The book is framed by a brief “Prologue” and “Epilogue,” in which an elderly widow named Sal, en route to a nursing home, watches with amusement as family members stumble onto an arresting surprise stored in her attic. We’re then treated to a leisurely, very funny account of the partnership formed by Sal, immediately following World War II, with her Army officer husband “Chesty” Chesterton’s comrade Winton “Wink” Dutton, a promising cartoonist and illustrator (albeit burdened with a crippled right hand). Wink, discharged, has journeyed to Chicago to look in on Chesty’s young wife Sal, who’s trying to keep their family’s business—a failing camera shop—alive. Upon renting a room from Sal, Wink learns she’s been augmenting the family income by posing as a pinup girl—and, when Chesty’s anticipated return home does not occur, the two join forces to create a thriving cottage industry. With the collusion of Sal’s equally bosomy gal pal Reenie, they create visual delights for the pleasure of horny GIs everywhere, and everything seems swell—until the subject of an unauthorized photo brings trouble; censors harass the hapless “pornographers”; and the well-meaning innocents flee to Wink’s hometown and the muted promise of a new life. The novel is fun throughout, if a tad redundant, and will remind many of the small-town fictional delights offered by Garrison Keillor and Eric Kraft. Amick has a gift for creating atmospheres that are both comic and oddly threatening, and he’s adept at layering in nifty references to the period’s pop culture.
A charmer. Even the little old lady from Dubuque will like this one.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37736-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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