More cynical than her usual Anne Tyler–lite approach, Berg’s depiction of her characters’ mid-life follies and ongoing...
A 40th high-school reunion reawakens old insecurities and crushes among former geeks, jocks, wallflowers and beauty queens.
In the small Ohio town of Clear Springs, the high-school class of 1960-something is about to relapse into old roles. Three of the alums still live in Clear Springs. Lester, science nerd, is now a veterinarian. Mary Alice, a four-eyed ugly duckling who never married, is caring for her 92-year-old neighbor Einer. Divorcée Dorothy, who hovered on the fringes of popularity, is crash-dieting in hopes of seducing quarterback Pete Decker, who, she hears, is separated from his wife and high-school sweetheart Nora. Blonde lead cheerleader Candy has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease, and she intends to fly to the reunion accompanied by her bulldog in lieu of husband Coop, whose micromanagement she finds exhausting. Pam, the unpopular girl still tasked, thanklessly, with organizing events, has planned the ultimate buzz-kill for the reunion dinner-dance. While trying to dump his mistress and win back Nora, Pete suffers a heart attack. He escapes from the hospital to attend the reunion dressed in ill-fitting golf togs purchased at the airport. Nora flaunts her new boyfriend, while Mary Alice is escorted by Einer, who vows to protect her from classmates who used to haze her. When Dorothy arrives flanked by girlfriends who made up her small clique, she’s dismayed to see Pete schmoozing Mary Alice. Einer shares his own high-school memories—then, they called the cool crowd “superlatives.” Candy seeks out Lester as her dinner mate, much to Mary Alice’s dismay: She had high hopes after lunch with Lester. Candy invites Lester to her hotel room, to examine the suspicious lumps she’s just discovered on her bulldog’s abdomen.
More cynical than her usual Anne Tyler–lite approach, Berg’s depiction of her characters’ mid-life follies and ongoing struggles with the specter of aging is at times hilarious, at times sad, but this time she steers clear of the maudlin to go for the jugular.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6864-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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