Critics rightly complained that Bob Slocum, the "hero" of Heller's last novel, Something Happened, was really Jewish beneath his WASP trappings. Well, now Heller atones for his ethnic coverup—with a vengeance. Bruce Gold is, there is no mistaking, a Jew. A college professor and bored writer of articles and books of "fiery caution and crusading inertia," he comes to the attention of the White House, through an old school chum on the staff there. The Washington idiots love Bruce's turns of phrase ("Nothing succeeds as planned," "boggle the mind"); the more imbecilic the prose, the more they adore it, and they offer him a position anywhere on the scale from "close Presidential source" to Secretary of State. (Bruce would love that, if only to crown his obsessive hatred of Henry Kissinger, whom he can't talk about without lapsing into a wicked, galled display of Yiddish.) The White House here plainly stands for archetypal Goyishe kup stupidity, the way the Army stood for confusion and lunacy in Catch-22, with about the same effect: a balloon-y, cartoon-y straw man of manic plenitude. But Heller's real talents come bursting out when he's dealing with Bruce among his own. Bruce's old friends from Coney Island all suddenly appear—successful publishers, doctors, editors of little magazines: "Invite a Jew to the White House—and you make him your slave." A shady garment manufacturer, Spotty Weinrock, and his practical-joke-playing doctor brother, Murshie, are hilarious, Mel-Brooksian portraits. And the book positively sings when Bruce is at table with his family. There's his octogenarian father, whom everyone wants to ship down to a Miami Beach condominium, but who refuses to leave—he couldn't bear to forgo the pleasure of noodging his grown children with 80 years' worth of stored-up contrariness and belittling. And there's older brother Sid, plus five sisters, who've been put on earth (as Bruce sees it) to make him feel like dreck, but in a "nice" way. If this nearly plotless book doesn't add up, all the big pieces provide a great, sloppy, assaulting, impolite comic energy. Heller's loose now, less focused and taking different sorts of risks; here he's flagrantly, Yiddishiy Jewish, taking us deep into familial dread and laughter.
Pub Date: March 1, 1979
ISBN: 0684839741
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
