Dr. Thomas More, Feliciana Parish psychiatrist, bad Catholic, boozy and allergic, makes a return in Percy's quasi-sequel to Love in the Ruins (1971)—and though the apocalypse seems just as certain now as it did then, things in this near-future seem somewhat calmer than were the earlier book's race wars. Euthanasia (both of helpless children and helpless oldsters) is general, AIDS and Alzheimer's patients are quarantined, and Dr. More himself has spent some time in Federal prison in Alabama for selling amphetamines to long-haul truckers (Percy's not one to put too glamorous a sheen on his heroes). But out on parole now, More notices odd findings in some of the few patients he has left, as well as in other people (including wife Ellen). They seem increasingly affectless, mindlessly well-balanced, given to specific information but not abstraction—and, weirdest of all, they are exhibiting primate-like behavior: public grooming, rear sexual presentation by females, etc. What's going on, it turns out, is a little bit of rogue socio-medical engineering by a bunch of local research doctors who are feeding heavy sodium ions into the drinking water of selected Feliciana Parish populations, and achieving spectacular results: no crime, no rape, no unemployment, no existential terrors, no alcoholism—at the price, however, of turning these people into monkeyish robots. And More—of the old school, someone who appreciates the up as well as down side of a good spiritual malaise—tracks down this Nazi-like experiment and endeavors to do something about stopping it. Percy has it all at his fingertips—the lovely character details, the ambiguous heroism of More, the fond eroticism—but maybe a little too much so: the thriller-like core of the book, tracking down and closing up the heavy-sodium project, has twice the this-and-then-that procedure it needs, half the novelistic shading; you get a sense of Percy bespelled by his own facility at writing low-brow in a high-brow framework. And like later Waugh, the comedy relies on types rather than on individual rascals (the exception is the wonderfully venal chief of the heavy-sodium doctors, Bob Comeaux). Love in the Ruins held together better, but a continuation of that book's specifically moral and at the same time antic lope is no bad thing at all; Percy fans will find it very agreeable, despite the thinness.
Pub Date: April 1, 1987
ISBN: 0312243324
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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