Although Lowell and Susan become reconciled, this is a sad, angry book, full of raw emotions elegantly phrased.
Revisiting the 1950s murder spree of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, romanticized in the classic 1973 movie Badlands, Ward, in her first novel, places her sympathies clearly with the victims.
The author follows three characters at different moments in their interwoven lives. In 1991, Lowell Bowman is a Manhattan antiquities dealer whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. We soon realize that Lowell’s parents were murdered by Starkweather and Fugate in Lincoln, Nebraska, when he was a boy. His wife Susan wants him to go to their former home in upstate New York and retrieve a safe deposit box he has secretly rented for years. Emotionally closed on many levels, racked by survivor’s guilt, he reluctantly travels upstate, not sure if he’s leaving Susan for good. In 1959, Susan is a 13-year-old whose troubled family has just moved to Lincoln. She’s first drawn to the Starkweather story for its adolescent romanticism, but as her mother moves toward abandoning Susan and her father, the girl shifts her obsession to the tragedy of the Bowmans’ orphaned son. While saving her best friend’s mother from possible suicide, Susan at last meets Lowell, and their attraction is immediate. In 1957, Caril Fugate is a dull-witted but conniving 14-year-old girl wildly infatuated with Starkweather, and, as his murder spree begins, she plays the part of passive participant. When she and Starkweather come to the Bowman home, she’s drawn to Mrs. Bowman but does nothing to help her when the opportunity arises. Ward, who has based the Bowmans on her own family, shows no sympathy for Fugate, portraying her as stereotypical white trash. In prison in 1976, Fugate still denies blame, viewing herself as victim. The obvious irony lies in the way guilt stains the life of the victim more than of the perpetrator.
Although Lowell and Susan become reconciled, this is a sad, angry book, full of raw emotions elegantly phrased.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7598-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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
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