A bit heavy on the backwoods caricatures, but a good read all the same: fast, and as fresh and unvarnished as a newly...
Hoffman’s latest excursion into the backwoods of Appalachia (Blood and Guile, 2000, etc.) continues the adventures of Charley LeBlanc, black sheep of a First Family of Virginia.
Charley—Virginia gentry, Vietnam vet, jailbird, drifter—has bad luck with homecomings. The last time he returned to his family’s estate at Bellerive (Tidewater Blood, 1998), his father, mother, and brother were killed when the house blew up—and Charley nearly went to jail for it. This time, he leaves his adopted home state of Montana to visit girlfriend Blackie in Cliffside, West Virginia, where he and she find that Aunt Jessie Arbuckle, a mountain woman who raised chickens for most of her 87 years, is dead of mysterious causes. Not a soul on earth wanted Aunt Jessie dead, and she was as poor as a church mouse, so how did this happen? Charley starts digging and learns to his horror that the prime suspect is Esmeralda, a backwoods girl who grew up near the mines run by Charley’s family. Duncan St.George, scion of a rival mining family even richer than Charley’s, claims to have seen Esmeralda leaving Aunt Jessie’s house with a bundle in her hands the night before Jessie was found dead. Now Esmeralda, who has a long and mysterious family connection to Charley, is locked away in the state mental hospital in Huntington, and Charley is determined to prove her innocent. Together with tough-as-nails Blackie, he makes his way through the thickets of backwoods power—from the friendly, corrupt county courthouse to the palatial estate of the nefarious St. George family to the roadhouses and tumbledown shacks of the local good old boys who always know a thing or two—to track his prey with all the determination of a practiced coon hunter.
A bit heavy on the backwoods caricatures, but a good read all the same: fast, and as fresh and unvarnished as a newly whittled stick.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019798-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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