Weldon's latest satiric bauble about a marriage on the rocks (Life Force, 1992, etc.). ``We're all Serbs and Croats and Bosnians at heart,'' says the pregnant Annette Horrocks, and then goes on to describe a news photo she saw of several young men sawing through someone's neck in the former Yugoslavia. The picture parallels her own life, Annette says—only her husband has ``been sawing through the inside of my head, not the outside, that's all.'' Indeed, Spicer Horrocks has been—although he sees the changes he's making in his life as positive and necessary. He and Annette have been married for ten years when she starts noticing strange signs—he takes up astrology, pores over a book entitled Cutting Free from Hurtful Ties, won't let Annette speak during sex, and castigates her for everything. She tries to talk it out, with Spicer turning it all back on her; indulges him by going into therapy, only to be sexually assaulted by the shrink of Spicer's choice; and smiles and accepts the blame (she calls this doing a ``Tweetie-pie''). Her best friend, Gilda, suspects that Spicer's jealous because Annette's about to publish her first novel. But Spicer's Jungian analyst, Dr. Rhea Marks, has another explanation: ``Spicer is leaving you, Mrs. Horrocks, and the material world.'' Meanwhile, Spicer avoids putting the house in Annette's name and stashes away cash—to ease his passing to another plane? It takes an excruciatingly long time for Annette to stop letting herself be victimized...but she does. This begins with all the wicked froth we've come to expect from the author of The Live and Loves of a She-Devil (1984), then crashes into a wall of pessimism about relations between the sexes- -making it one of Weldon's bitterest efforts so far. She usually distributes her satire more evenhandedly; here, husbands and therapists get coated with it, while the wife comes out clean. Not Weldon's best, then, but bracing stuff nonetheless.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84148-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
IN THE NEWS
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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