A fascinating, cleareyed consideration of racial relations among close friends.
A liberal white professor contends with racial politics following her son’s terrible mistake in this literary novel.
Former student radical Bettina Grosjean, now a professor of women’s history, is generally quite pleased with her life on New York’s Upper West Side. Sure, her aging mother, a Holocaust survivor, has taken to hiding in her closet, and there’s some “ugliness” with husband Stephen given his increasing cynicism in his work as director of environmental affairs at City Hall. But she is proud of her bond with Viola Nightingale, a black woman originally from Georgia with whom she built the “Special Enrichment Program” at the school attended by Bettina’s son Zack, 13, and Viola’s son Cyrus, who, like their mothers, are best friends. “By the time of that fateful October day,” Bettina recalls, “we’d morphed into one beautiful rainbow-colored family.” Then Bettina’s bubble bursts: she, Stephen, and their younger daughter, Hallie, arrive home from a weekend jaunt to Vermont to discover that Zack, after returning from a school trip to D.C., is being questioned by police regarding a pushing incident that put Cyrus in a coma. A benumbed Viola retreats into grief, while Marcus Hake, “the city’s most powerful black leader” and whom Bettina “secretly admired for years,” makes hay out of the situation, ultimately landing Zack in juvenile detention. Only some crafty maneuvering can save the day. In this sophomore effort, Pashman (The Speed of Light, 1997) places a relatable, recognizable woman into the compelling cross hairs of America’s enduring racial tensions. Zack’s observations of racial realities and the simmering resentments expressed by some of the parents about the enrichment program are some of the saddest, most striking sequences of this book. Bettina’s mother is a somewhat distracting side note to these proceedings, however, and this novel’s ending feels like a bit too easy. Overall, however, Pashman has raised many issues here that ring true.
A fascinating, cleareyed consideration of racial relations among close friends.Pub Date: May 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941861-03-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Harvard Square Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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