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THE NURSERY

Commendably honest but not compelling fiction.

An overwhelmed new mother vents.

The mood in this debut novel is claustrophobic, and no wonder, since the unnamed narrator refuses to leave her apartment, much to the chagrin of her supportive but increasingly concerned and frustrated husband, John. She won’t even go to the first two checkups for their daughter, Button—well, that’s not her real name, the woman informs us: “The baby I hold in my arms is a leech, let’s call her Button.” Molnar grittily conjures the exhaustion and disorientation of the first weeks with a first child in a narration that voices furious resentment of Button’s insatiable demands and some scary thoughts about harming her. John’s cheerful acceptance of their new routine is easy for him, she bitterly muses; he gets to go to the office and sleep through the night while she gets up to nurse yet again. Miffo (the narrator’s name for her floundering postpartum self) lost her own mother as a girl and painfully feels the lack of a maternal role model; John and well-meaning friends try to help, but she pushes them all away, becalmed in severe depression. Only an elderly upstairs neighbor, who initially knocks on her door to complain about the baby crying, becomes an odd sort of confidant, and then dies. Wistful memories of time with John “before” and of her work as a translator, when “I could choose between this word or that [and] linger in silence,” will strike a chord with anyone who remembers the difficult adjustment to life ruled by someone else’s needs, but Miffo seems never to experience the moments of joy that, for most new parents, at least occasionally alleviate the equally powerful exhaustion, anger, and sorrow. She strikes one dreary note throughout, and by the time she finally emerges from her depression and steps outdoors, readers may well be very tired of her.

Commendably honest but not compelling fiction.

Pub Date: March 21, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-59331-684-9

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.

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An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.

As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.

A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021

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