Fragmented, newly uncovered novel by Wolfe, found in his ledgers and written at the summit of his descriptive powers. Four-fifths of this cumulative but largely plotless re- creation of turn-of-the-century New York has never before seen print, though bits and pieces were excerpted in From Death to Morning, Of Time and the River, and The Web and the Rock. Wolfe wrote this huge ode in his early 30's, while swimming blindly through a cyclic novel he called The October Fair, whose first installment saw light as Of Time and the River, minus this ungainly section that has nothing to do with Eugene Gant or George Webber. He was aided by his mistress, stage designer Aline Bernstein, who wrote voluminous notes for him about her childhood, youth and early womanhood, from which the author fashioned the young Jewess Esther Jack, whose mind is the center of The Good Child's River. Bernstein later used some of the same material for her two books about herself and Wolfe, The Journey Down and An Actor's Daughter. The novel is a meditation, in Wolfe's boldest style, on time as a dark, rich river bearing the mind of Esther Jack and is a sheaf of fabulous set-pieces, exhilarating rhapsodies, family portraits of eccentrics. Yes, there are clinkers about the Jews, things Esther would never say or think, and some of his women are sticks, but all is forgiven in the sheer magic of Wolfe unbound, as in Esther/Wolfe riding through Central Park at first-light: ``...suddenly I heard each sound the birdsong made: like a flight of shot, the sharp fast scraps of sound arose. With chittering bicker, fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birdcries came. Smooth drops and nuggets of bright gold they were. Now sang the birdtree filled with lutings in bright air....'' Wolfe's framework—of figures aflood in rivering night—is clearly borrowed from Whitman's great night-poem ``The Sleepers'' but is no insult to the original. An often stunningly disciplined first draft—by a genius.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1991
ISBN: 0-8078-2002-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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