It’s more reassuring to think of the author not as surgeon or astronomer, but as a concerned parent who gently heads off...
Comedian/playwright/essayist Martin (Pure Drivel, 1998, etc.) adds still another string to his bow with this winsome fairy tale of ill-matched love in Beverly Hills.
Martin seems to approach his characters like a surgeon for whom they hold no secrets—not one of those plastic surgeons whose prowess can be seen adorning the minor characters, but an old-fashioned G.P. who still cares about his patients. Mirabelle Buttersfield, who doesn’t care that she’s stuck in a dead-end job (selling gloves at Neiman Marcus) because she’s really an artist, may not know that nobody in the world but herself thinks she’s an artist. But Martin knows. He knows that Ray Porter, the Seattle millionaire who’s wooing Mirabelle, doesn’t intend to make any commitment to her, even though Mirabelle understands the conversation in which he seeks to establish his polite wariness in exactly the opposite terms. And he knows, even if Mirabelle doesn’t, that she’s worth a hundred of the blow-dried floozies like Lisa Cramer, one aisle over in fragrances, who’d love to be draped on Ray’s arm instead. The delicacy of Martin’s perception is so appealing that he succeeds in building a novella out of nothing but nonstop explanations of things the characters don’t understand: why Ray is drawn to such an unprepossessing heroine in the first place, how his unfailing kindness is different from the love she craves, how she retreats periodically into the terrors of clinical depression, why their romance is doomed even though they love each other. Though Martin’s telescope brings each of his heavenly bodies up fascinatingly close, though, it also isolates them each from the others, and there’s something chilly in this little fable.
It’s more reassuring to think of the author not as surgeon or astronomer, but as a concerned parent who gently heads off every answer readers could possibly have about this bedtime story of loneliness faced and conquered before he finally turns out the light.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6658-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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