THE WORLD’S ROOM

Name: THE WORLD’S ROOM
Author: Todd London
ISBN: 1-58642-022-4

by Todd London ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2001

With graceful nuance and subtlety, London’s tale is a melancholy success, a cleanly written, emotionally credible debut that...

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Newcomer London offers a rich, nimble instance of the coming-of-age story, in which his narrator straightens himself up into life from the lurid psychological skein of his family.

Teddy Hofmann opens by confessing that he has been known as Erich—at least since his older brother, an original bearer of the name, committed suicide in 1969. The history of this oddity begins in New Jersey, where the Hofmann family (Teddy, Erich, sister Deborah, mother Lorna, father Willy) breaks apart. Lorna, a compelling, erratic character whose sense of entrapment is eloquently sketched, gathers her children together, and drives south, for Mexico. When Columbia professor Willy at last ceases supporting his wife’s apparent lark, Lorna and the kids travel north to Los Angeles, where they settle in Venice. Then, however,Teddy’s family begins to shudder under the pressures of California in the ’60s, a flighty mother, an idiosyncratically intelligent brother, and a sister bitter about her neglectful father. Erich, Lorna’s clear favorite, begins an epic poem/ballad about his life, which Teddy covets as a clue to her affection. Later, Erich is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., where he commits suicide. After his death, his grieving mother begins calling Teddy by her first son’s name—with the result that Teddy himself spends the ’70s and ’80s a man divided in himself, and unable to find his own center. A disastrous love affair, and the death of his mother, heighten his crisis of personality, while the rupture of his sister’s childless marriage reunites the children briefly, before Teddy heads south again, to Mexico, in an attempt to clarify his own history. At the close, Willy suffers a stroke that will finally kill him, and Teddy is given the chance to view his family through his father’s hidden eyes.

With graceful nuance and subtlety, London’s tale is a melancholy success, a cleanly written, emotionally credible debut that tamps its pathos with a firm, generous clarity, and so eliminates the hazy lilt of sentimentality.

Pub Date: May 7, 2001

ISBN: 1-58642-022-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS IS NOT MY MEMOIR
by André Gregory & Todd London

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Awards & Accolades

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17

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

17

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK OF LIVES
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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.