Neither the pre-publication publicity nor Coover's exuberant word-riffs can conceal the tiny-mindedness behind this rewrite of early-1950s American history as comic-book mytho-fantasy. The "public burning" is the Ethel & Julius Rosenberg electrocution, here transformed into the Times Square vaudeville-rally that everyone—dodo Ike, "Boy Judge" Kaufman, prosecutor Saypol, and folksy, ballsy "Superhero" Uncle Sam himself—is bloodthirstily, Yahoo-istically waiting for. Justice Douglas' stay-of-execution creates a delay: time for the pinko servants of Sam's arch-enemy ("the Phantom!") to march and picket. And time for pathetic, paranoid Veep R. Nixon, who narrates every other chapter, to rehash the case; to detect parallels between the Rosenberg and Nixon family histories; to realize that "Eth" and "Julie" are "taking the rap for somebody else"; and to lose himself in masturbatory fantasies of earthy Ethel. As the execution-day gala commences—public spanking of Douglas, skits based on the Rosenberg Death House Letters by Astaire & Rogers, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers—Nixon rushes to Sing-Sing for an erotic encounter with Ethel ("Richard, I could eat you in sheer extremity of feeling!"), tries to divert the the death-hungry Times Sq. horde ("everbody "drop his pants for America!"), precipitates an apocalyptic mob scene, and—after the electrocutions take place as scheduled—is initiated into America's power elite via sodomy by Uncle Sam: a "rendyvoos with destiny ain't no beanbag!" As a novella (the author's original intent), this ingenious scenario would flare, stun, and leave its mark. But Coover's inflationary technique—reduce to a one-liner and then free-associate, allude, and expand like crazy—belabors and betrays the essential gimcrack design. The tone of righteous sarcasm becomes a drone. Chunks of the public record are jazzily ornamented and tossed in. Juicy zingers about TIME and the N.Y. Times are whipped into the consistency of poured concrete. With no human moorings (for all the psycho-portraiture, RMN never graduates from gimmick to character), Coover skids between easy-target satire (Bruce, Sahl, et al. were there first) and melodramatic grandstanding, with no new insights worthy of his remarkable rhetorical talents. A provocative kernel lost in a dazzling, deadening morass: precisely the kind of book more likely to be talked about than read.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1977
ISBN: 0802135277
Page Count: 564
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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