Carefully crafted and thoughtful, if at times overbearing in telegraphing its messages.
What’s more intimate and risky: genuine friendship or romantic love? asks first-novelist/nonfiction author Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer, 2001, etc.).
Troubled adolescent Cuzzy Gage—so-called because he is everyone’s cousin in the pointedly named community of Poverty, in upstate New York—has been living in the woods since his uncle kicked him out of the house after Cuzzy slept with the uncle’s pregnant live-in niece. His mother died years ago; his minister father is in a mental institution. About to turn 18, Cuzzy has already fathered a child himself, but the baby’s mother, a clone of Luanne on TV’s King of the Hill, has been refusing to see him, so he spends his time hanging out at the local convenience store with misfits like the cousin who may have molested his sister and the local bully/drug dealer. Polite society, which lives down the road in vacation homes, calls these folks trailer trash. Enter Tracy Edwards in his Porsche. He’s staying at one of the largest estate retreats, archiving the papers of his recently dead friend Algie, a musicologist whose advances the heterosexual Tracy rebuffed long ago. Poverty’s current minister, Jason Trimble, who’s gotten to know Cuzzy’s father, approaches Tracy and asks him to help reach the boy. Soon Cuzzy, attracted initially by the wealthy comfort of Tracy’s life but hungry for affection, stability, and the world of ideas, is living at the estate and working for Tracy. The older man takes Cuzzy under his wing, trying to be a Good Samaritan, but his privileged naiveté blinds him to the impact of their relationship on the boy’s position in Poverty. The result is a tragedy of shocking brutality, especially in contrast to the rather literary rendering of all that has come before.
Carefully crafted and thoughtful, if at times overbearing in telegraphing its messages.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-11559-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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