Olson's outlandish novels (Seaview, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame) are, at their best moments, balanced with a risky imagination that can send a reader beyond incredulity and into fascination. Here, however, the scales don't come even close to the horizontal: in a mishmash of "deep-image" episodes and pretentious, unbelievable monologues ("The memory. To ferret facts out of that mire, to draw conclusions, as if the vividness of the facts could make them real events and not just colorful constructions that remain constantly suspect") and randomly lurid tableaux, Olson has come up with an unintentionally hilarious piece of work. The protagonist is David, a masseur who was left by wife Lorca and then spent almost a decade as the roomate of a fashion designer named Anson—a man we're asked to believe David didn't realize was gay until he surprises him in bed with another man (and then later when Anson contracts AIDS). Anson's body after his death is spirited off mysteriously to Utah, where David goes in pilgrimage/search, giving massages on the way to old friends and clients, all of whom at the end—Anson in his grave; Lorca as a bee-keeping painter; a member of the Catholic hierarchy recently sprung from the closet (a massage client of David's in New York); and groups of various friends—are reunited at a Utah artist's colony through a series of coincidences that would have made O. Henry blush. This grand reunion is climaxed by a mass massage that Olson clearly means to be an apotheosis of supra-sexuality, but that a reader can read only while biting down on his or her fist to stifle the giggles. Olson, in fact, begins to seems the literary equivalent of the all-flash contemporary realist painter Eric Fischl: an essentially voyeuristic imagination that doctors itself up in the trappings of emblematic meditations on sex and mystery. Beneath it all, though, it's fiction lite-style, with precious little that's original or meaningful.
Pub Date: June 3, 1987
ISBN: 1892295350
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Linden/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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