For all its technical virtuosity, Ford's chummy narrative fails to transcend its rather tired genre: the male, mid-life crisis novel. Unavoidably confessional, this back-slapping fictional memoir by the author of A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck boasts of its "dirty realist" conceit: "the only truth that can never be a lie. . .is life itself." In this case, "life itself" (a.k.a. Real Life as opposed to the artifice of sissified fiction) means the extraordinary ordinariness of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old sportswriter for a magazine much like Sports Illustrated, who's part of a "modern, divided family." His ex-wife, "X," lives nearby in suburban New Jersey with their two kids and the shared memory of a "genetic" existence. What brings them temporarily together at the novel's outset is the same thing that inspires Frank's uncharacteristically introspective ramble: the birthday of their son Ralph, who died a few years back from Reyes. Until recently, Frank's managed to "face down regret" and "avoid ruin"; once a promising fiction writer, he now prefers to write about a subject for which he holds no special brief. As he tries to explain in his own meandering way, everyone touched lately by his unexemplary life seems bent on destroying the equanimity he finds in suburban anonymity. There's Herb, for instance: the crippled, ex-football player who Frank interviews in hope of an uplifting tale, but who offers instead a bitter story of a sportsman without a sport (i.e., a man without a metaphor for his life). There's also Waiter: the newest member of the Divorced Men's Club, who, by confiding some dark secrets to Frank, transforms male bonding into a kind of male bondage. And then there's Vicki: Frank's latest flame, a sexy young nurse whose taste runs to synthetics, but who refuses to be the pliant bimbo Frank really seems to want. When it comes right down to it, though, it's never very clear in this confused novel what Frank wants, except to convince the reader that "being a man gets harder all the time." Ford's singular voice seems squandered on such disposable wisdom and such an insignificant life.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0679762108
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
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
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