An intimate, loving portrait of a dreaded disease’s devastating effects.
Second-novelist Hays (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) beautifully captures a husband’s grief as he watches his beloved wife slip into Alzheimer’s.
“My wife has gone,” ventures narrator Prate Marshbanks in the first sentence, and by this he means that Irene, his companion of 50 years, has begun to forget how to drive, cook, and take care of herself; sometimes she even forgets who her husband is. Prate is 75, a prickly, do-it-yourself house painter in Greenville, South Carolina, who adores his cultured wife, a former teacher, for having chosen him over more promising suitors. Although he initially resists the urgings of her doctor and of their only son, Newell, to put Irene in a nursing home, Prate finally recognizes that he can no longer give her the constant, watchful care she needs. Visiting her for hours daily at Rolling Hills, he learns in dismay that “the less you could take care of yourself, the less you were taken care of.” Newell, an overworked widower in North Carolina, needs to spend time at an artist colony in order to churn out paintings, so he leaves his reticent, bookish nine-year-old son, Jackson, in his father’s care for six weeks. The setup is complete when Billie, the lonely single gal next door, turns out to be an admirer of Newell’s work and insinuates herself into the household by helping to entertain Jackson. The plot is driven forward by Irene and Jackson’s beneficial impact on each other, and by the predictable progression of Billie and Newell’s romance. The crux of this affecting story, however, is the delineation of Prate’s love and sorrow as he helplessly witnesses the degeneration of his wife’s fine mind. When she fails to recognize their home, for example, he feels “like a plug had been pulled and our lifetime together was draining away.” Colloquial in tone, braced by its narrator’s stoic, plainspoken candor, Hays’s latest outing feels timely and true.
An intimate, loving portrait of a dreaded disease’s devastating effects.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33932-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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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