“The mind grinds,” says writer earlier. So do reader’s teeth.
From storywriter and non-fictionist Farber, an inert and self-involved second novel (after Curves of Pursuit, 1984) about an affair between an older man and a young woman.
All starts when an aunt asks “the writer” if he’d be so good as to meet a niece who’s finishing a Ph.D., is interested in literature, etc. Sure. Even though the niece is newly married (her aunt doesn’t know it), the meeting goes—very well indeed. The girl’s interest is piqued rather than dampened when, seeing him again, she learns that “writer” is in the habit of hiring models to sit nude while he looks at them, or doesn’t, or makes notes, or does whatever it is genus “writer” does. Models soon become unnecessary as girl and writer embark on an affair of their own—one that before long includes many, many Polaroids that become increasingly up close and personal. But the overt sex (there’s plenty) is as nothing to the groans and somnolence induced by Farber’s missteps and affectations in the delivery of it. In deference to their age difference, the two take to calling each other father” and “my daughter” (father will later become “Zeus”), leading, among other things, to father’s saccharine habit of adjectivizing daughter (“Poor baby . . . cry-baby baby,” even “Good baby” and “Flexible baby”). Writer exults in “how she’s reawakened his love of story!” Yet he gets angry at his daughter for “reading his fiction as autobiography,” says that she “has no right to these stories,” goes even so far as to “retort” that “‘My thoughts are my own.’” A curious notion for a writer. This ghastly stuff continues without any quickening of either into a realized character anyone could care about. Writer, it seems, has had heart trouble, but now he’s better. “His heart. Amazing, that it keeps beating,” he comments. “Steady, undramatic. Over and over again.”
“The mind grinds,” says writer earlier. So do reader’s teeth.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6972-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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