Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late ’60s since Marge Piercy’s early fiction, and one of Boyle’s...
Boyle’s protean imagination works overtime in his thickly plotted ninth novel, a big, racy tale of the conflict between a radical utopian commune’s idealistic visions and the simpler imperatives of survival in the Alaskan wilderness.
In Drop City, a California hippie enclave in 1970, we observe through the eyes of its newest members: “Star,” a restless dropout from her parents’ straight life, and Mario, a hardier type who drifts into the City because he knows he wants to build things. Boyle then shifts to Boynton, Alaska (near Fairbanks), where homesteader Cecil (“Sess”) Harder and his new wife Pamela begin their life together in Sess’s well-stocked cabin in the deep woods. As parallel chunks of narrative further introduce us to both sets of characters, a ludicrous auto accident brings the heat down on Drop City, and its putative guru Norm (whose inherited wealth pays the bills) leads the group’s relocation to Alaska, where the peace-and-love people collide with the Harders. A cruel winter, sexual and racial disharmony, and Norm’s decision to pull up his personal stakes exact their toll, and the story churns fatalistically toward its violent climax, on Halloween, in sub-zero cold. Boyle has worked this territory before in several sensationally effective stories, but never with such telling detail and devastating characterizations. The best of the latter include the stoical Sess and warmhearted Pamela, murderous trapper (and Sess’s mortal enemy) Joe Bosky, and weak-willed Ronnie Sommers (a.k.a. Pan), a lethal combination of ingenuous flower-power and uncontrollable appetites. Boyle (After the Plague, 2001, etc.) never fails to enthrall and entertain, but the mordant tragicomic momentum is perhaps too explicitly subordinated to his agenda—revealed in such sequences as the aftermath of a scary episode that endangered Drop City’s toddlers (“They [i.e., the adults] didn’t want to save children, they wanted to be children”).
Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late ’60s since Marge Piercy’s early fiction, and one of Boyle’s best.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03172-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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