Nothing clarifies and focuses a superior first novel like its successor: all the cells of the former are stained by the latter's stresses, repetitions; and a pattern ought to start to emerge. Well, that's happened here—and the news is that Birdy was no fluke. Wharton has a real theme—the joys and abysmal pain of containing alternate realities within one life—and he has the continued means to bring it across powerfully. In Birdy, the wish to be a bird inhabited a boy; in Dad, the desire to have lived a better, different life floods through the consciousness of an old man under great stress. Narrating is John Tremont, Jr., 52, a painter who lives in Paris and is called back to southern California when his mother has a series of serious heart attacks. A frightened, fragile, high-strung, and domineering woman, Mom can't stand her invalidism. And when the far gentler Dad suddenly takes ill too-bladder tumors—and begins to abruptly fail (the sudden onset of horrifying senility and coma), John Jr. is in the custodial role of helplessly overseeing his parents' degeneration—that trauma which all adults fear and are loath to consider. (Complicating the situation is the arrival of John's own son, dropped-out from college, who puts him into a double bind of generations forward and back: how can he be a father if, at 52, he's so concerned but ultimately ineffectual a son?) This far along, then, Wharton has been providing a grimly specific, daily, realistic portrait of the horrors of oldness and dying: the dealing with incontinence, with unfeeling doctors, the impatience, the being constantly on-call, the irreversibility of the decline. And then, about mid-way, miraculously, Dad pulls out of his senile coma and seems to recover completely. In fact, he becomes more alive than ever: spry, mischievous, randy, creative, antic—a Pan far more spirited than the already scared-witless and emotionally costive Mom can bear. Even worse for her, Dad now admits to a lifelong feeling of having had another, near-duplicate life and family across the country—in Cape May, New Jersey! Delusion? Possibility? As Dad's freedom, real or imagined, is quickly beaten back into insensateness and eventual death by Mom, we watch this lovely flicker being snuffed out. And as incontestably awful and frightening as such a common situation is—death of spirit by family, that is—Wharton invests it with a hint of yearning and mirage simply by piling one plain, real occurrence atop another: he's a superb fabulist, we're learning, of the mundane, American, no-frills existence. True, alternating chapters narrated by Tremont's son, meant as a foil, don't really work (just as the double narrator in parts of Birdy didn't)—but this is only a minor flaw. So: a major novel from a writer whose magnitude has now been gloriously confirmed—in a haunting book full of pain and misery, but one which (thanks to Wharton's method, skill, and vista) you have to be reminded to be depressed over.
Pub Date: May 28, 1981
ISBN: 155704256X
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1981
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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