An insouciant antipastoral as bracing and bitter as a January nor’easter. Don’t miss it.
Archie Bunker would look like Ralph Nader alongside the robust, profane life force who easily dominates this zesty, entertaining second novel by the Maine poet and author (A Keeper of Sheep, 1994).
He’s Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, a native of fictional Orphan Point who has survived both Vietnam and a bad ticker, spent 30 years leading the hard life of an independent lobster fisherman, and has just about had it with rival lobstermen, tightfisted middleman Clyde Hannaford, and Lucky’s increasingly combative family: wife Sarah, who’s become an “artist” producing “little sea glass sculptures”; smart-mouthed college-age daughter Kristen; and 20-year-old skinhead high-school dropout Kyle, who gives evidence of being uneducable, unemployable, mad at the world, and gay. As if this isn’t enough, Lucky hires Clyde’s estranged sexpot wife Ronette as “stern man” aboard (his boat) The Wooden Nickel, gets her pregnant, splits with Sarah, and fires a “warning shot” that goes astray during a “lobster war” over disputed fishing areas. As a result, Lucky is courted by an affable ex-con plotting to burgle rich out-of-staters’ houses and by wily Mr. Moto, who specializes in marketing illegal oversized “Godzilla lobsters” and whale meat. Carpenter keeps his busy plot boiling, as Lucky and Ronette encounter a nasty cetacean tangled in fishing lines, then must survive a rescue by a boatful of horny rednecks. It all reads as if Carolyn Chute had moved eastward to the coast, or Richard Russo’s townies had grown extra layers of grit and cussedness. And Lucky is a terrific creation: ribald, cranky, deeply conservative, homophobic, xenophobic, irrationally violent—and the unquenchable source of malevolently funny one-liners that can drop you dead in your tracks (dealing with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, for example, is “like going after a dog turd with a pair of oars”).
An insouciant antipastoral as bracing and bitter as a January nor’easter. Don’t miss it.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-13400-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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