An undeniably audacious, if self-consciously Southwest Gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore.
In Froderberg’s highly stylized, uniquely voiced first novel, a young bride’s growing disillusionment about her marriage coincides with the drought plaguing her Arizona community.
Seventeen-year-old Girl, whose briefly sketched, quickly forgotten parents have left her pretty much on her own, marries Son, the heir to a successful rancher, after a short, passionate courtship. Son’s mother and father, called Rose and Rose’s Daddy, are loving in-laws and their ranch was a paradise of fecundity in its time, as Rose’s Daddy explains in elaborate recitations. But a drought has set in, both physical and spiritual. Without water, the local economy is in a tailspin. The ranch sits above an aquifer, and in the past Rose’s Daddy has made a fortune selling off water. But now he is struggling. Son is soon leaving Girl to drink and entertain other women, in particular the daughter of his father’s longtime mistress Pearl. Deeply religious Rose withers away and dies, but not before she’s introduced Girl to Padre, a New Age minister. Son’s father sinks into a deep depression, ultimately committing suicide. Son’s mourning takes the form of profound anger and even wilder carousing. Girl seeks counsel from Padre, on whom she develops a profound and requited crush. She moves off the farm and stays briefly with Pearl’s father while Pearl and her mother are “north,” where Pearl is preparing to give birth, possibly to Son’s child, an irony since Girl has an abortion. But Son begs Girl to return to him and together they prepare for the big rodeo. The church burns down, and Padre moves on to another parish. Son is thrown from his horse, sustaining major neurogenic injuries that leave him with a ruined face and completely dependent on Girl. And then the rains come. Realism is not the point in Girl’s elliptical narrative, told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit.
An undeniably audacious, if self-consciously Southwest Gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-09877-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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