Question: when are three or four John Cheever stories less welcome than one? Answer: when, as here, those three or four stories are fragmented and intertwined into a novella—an itchy, neither-here-nor-there form which, unlike the short story, doesn't frame the delicate late-Cheever melange (nostalgia, satire, fable, spirituality) with structural sureness. The principal story-line, recalling "The World of Apples," offers an elderly gentleman in love—or is it lust? Lemuel Sears, a twice-widowed computer-industry executive, spies beautiful real-estate woman Renee in a Manhattan bank, is swamped with reborn Eros ("She could have been the winsome girl on the oleomargarine package or the Oriental dancer on his father's cigar box who used to stir his little prick when he was about nine"), and is soon her insatiable lover; however, when Renee—an elusive sort dedicated to New School-style self-improvement—proves to be cruelly fickle, Sears promptly finds himself in a low-key, tender affair with. . . Renee's middle-aged doorman. (His "next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.") Is this love or lewdness? That's a familiar Cheever theme. And the intermingled subplots here involve another Cheever standby: clean, pure water as a symbol of the old verities, of love's cleansing force. Sears, you see, is personally funding an investigation into the polluting of Beasley's Pond up in Connecticut (he loves to skate there), so there is a series of black-comic suburban vignettes tenuously linked to the matter of the Pond: the story of the Italian barber who, poverty-stricken, is hired by the Mafia-like "organization" to oversee the corrupt-government dumping at the Pond; the story of the barber's neighbor Betsy Logan—who gets into a brawl with the barber's pushy wife at the Musak-ridden supermarket, who misplaces her baby on the highway, who finally uses desperate measures (fighting poison with poison) to stop the pollution at Beasley's Pond. And we're explicitly told how all the strands here should connect up: "The clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured [ Sears'] consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination." Yet, despite some elegant stitchwork, Cheever never really overcomes the feeling that these are short-story fragments artificially brought together in an uneasy, uncharacteristically disjointed narrative; and, as a result, the risky maneuvers which are often magical in a seamless Cheever story—sudden jolts of black-comedy, wildly implausible twists of Fate—more often fall flat here. A failure, then? Perhaps. But, like Graham Greene's unsatisfying novella/fable Doctor Fischer of Geneva, this offers distinctive rewards along the way: a handful of moodily haunting images, a few choice ironies, much gorgeous prose—including an inspired, freewheeling sequence in which Sears explains to himself why being rejected by Renee is like being transported to a village in the Balkans. And, however flawed the overall composition here, Cheever readers will probably feel, quite rightly, that such genuine morsels of joyful art are too precious to pass up.
Pub Date: March 10, 1982
ISBN: 0679737855
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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