The author of the well-received first novel Mohawk (1986), a long soap opera set in a decaying mill town in upstate New York, here returns to that setting with a father-son drama that spans several decades. With an unerring sense of place, the book transcends some soapiness of its own and breathes life into its small-town types. Ned Hall tells the story of his father Sam, who is at the very bottom of the autoinsurance risk pool; of his mother Jenny, who breaks down after her lover, a priest, leaves her at the communion rail; and of the assorted citizens of Mohawk, ranging from suicidal adolescents and battered drunks to well-to-do philanderers and a solicitous attorney. Sam is the most memorable character, a classic rogue and no-account who appears in his son's life at will until Jenny breaks down. Ned moves in with his father and receives a young man's classic education into street life in the 50's: he learns how to play pool, how to bet the horses, how to steal and lie—partly from malice and hurt, partly to please others. He witnesses endless fights between his father and Drew, the son of his father's girlfriend. He falls in love with the well-to-do girl on the hill and returns, years later, to become her lover and his father's buddy before leaving again. Drew gets killed, Jenny moves to California with the solicitous lawyer, and Sam gets cancer. Though the book gets baggy with too many long-winded stories about smalltown eccentrics and grotesques, its ending is a powerful epiphany, if a bit forced: Ned's girl has a child at the same time as Sam dies. The seasonal structure here comes full circle. Self-consciously written as an old-fashioned novel, the book creates a time and place with gusto and, by its end, manages to move us.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1988
ISBN: 0679753834
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1988
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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