It’s tempting to call this a small gem, except there’s nothing small about a work that glows with such tenderness for its...
A boy witnesses the breakup of his family in a heart-stopping first novel.
Anna is clear: Her 20-year-old marriage to Bob is over, done, kaput. She’d caught him cheating, in their own bed no less, but the final straw was his “shit-eating grin.” This is happening in 1979 in Cargill Falls, Connecticut, where ex-Marine Bob washes windows and Anna works at a department store. The sudden rupture leaves their only child, ten-year-old Daniel, feeling miserably torn. He’s ashamed to find his father’s clothes hanging on the front-yard bushes, and so he retrieves them; but when Bob shows up outside his bedroom window at night, looking pathetic, Dan keeps a poker face. The fact is, he misses both parents: the father who is gone from the house, and the mother who has disappeared inside herself. Until then, it had been a good marriage. Bob, ten years her senior, had been Anna’s ticket out of an unhappy home in Brooklyn, but now something steely in her rejects compromise. Poor Dan can only exhale when Bob takes him for rides on the back roads: The man and the boy, Lychack calls them, to underscore the power of the adult, the helplessness of the child. Still, an enterprising child can exert considerable power, as Dan shows when he boards a bus for New York, intent on redeeming his mother’s ring and making their circle whole again. There’s a fine scrappy scene in a pawnshop, where Dan holds off three fearsome employees long enough to swallow the ring. Bob arrives, and father and son spend time by a country lake, “brief and perfect and doomed,” but long enough for the son to realize that Bob is a well-meaning man who fails to think things through, and for the father to understand Dan will grow up better without him.
It’s tempting to call this a small gem, except there’s nothing small about a work that glows with such tenderness for its three leads.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-30244-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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