An almost unbearable sense of the futility and pain that ensue from the failure of decent people to sustain loving relationships lies at the heart of this bleak sixth novel by the New Hampshire author (Novemberfest,1994, etc.). Weesner, whose meditative style and painstaking narrative architecture gradually build a vividly evoked world, opens his story with a tight focus on Maine lobsterman Warren Hudon’s arduous performance of his daily chores. Warren both accepts and ignores the fact that he’s dying from lung cancer—a fact he conceals from Beatrice, his unfaithful, long-estranged wife (with whom he still lives, however), and their daughter, Marian, also trapped in a loveless marriage, to a coarse husband she’s eager to ditch. The viewpoint shifts among these three and Virgil Pound, the sleek, duplicitous former state senator (himself married for many years) who has, as Warren well knows, been Beatrice’s lover for 30 years. Is the unassuming Warren, as seems strongly implied, a Dante wandering in a dark wood of suffering, separated from his Beatrice, (mis-)guided by an utterly self-absorbed Virgil? Such parallels aren—t developed, but there’s genuine tragic force in the tale’s inexorable progression. Preparing to die, Warren seeks a meeting with Beatrice, hoping to forgive and to find peace. Guilty and suspicious because she has long felt taken for granted, she rebuffs him. Then, reversing a pattern of 30 years of passivity, Warren acts’shattering four lives irreparably. The devastatingly ironic denouement foreshadows the lasting consequences, even as it hints at the possibility of reconciliation beyond any he had hoped for. The triumph of Weesner’s rigorously realistic story is that we come to know his characters as fully as we know ourselves, yet are as startled by the directions in which their emotions lead them as we are by the unpredictability of our own lives. An unforgettable novel, unquestionably Weesner’s best to date.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-766-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
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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