Emotionally complex, politically intelligent, beautifully written: Among the best from a novelist in the classic American...
In a small city north of Boston in the late ’60s, a boy expands his horizons even as he discovers the enduring strength of “loyalty to a neighborhood and affection for a family—those twin steel bonds of the working class”—in Merullo’s elegiac fourth novel, a companion to Revere Beach Boulevard (1998).
Anthony Benedetto looks back on his youth in Revere, Massachusetts, from the vantage of middle age in rural Vermont, where he is a modestly successful portrait painter. Tonio is only 11 when his parents die in a plane crash; he’s raised by his gentle, reflective grandfather and strong, serene grandmother, who temper his early introduction to life’s existential uncertainty with their personal examples of loving devotion to duty, work, and kin. His anxious, edgy uncle Peter, a Golden Gloves boxer who retreated back to the neighborhood after losing a crucial bout, reminds him how confining their world can be. Peter’s daughter Rosalie is Tonio’s close friend, but she pushes him away in adolescence, when Tonio’s good grades and hockey skills take him to Exeter while Rosalie remains in the tough local high school, running around with its meanest creep. Tonio feels comfortable enough among Exeter’s privileged students, though he and his African-American roommate are drawn especially close by their ambiguous relationship with the less fortunate folks back home now that they’ve “gone off and joined the oppressor.” Despite a suicide attempt, a lingering death, and references to several future bad ends, the narrator’s tone is rueful and meditative rather than anguished. Most writers begin with their coming-of-agers, but Merullo was wise to wait. His artistic maturity gives us a tale of sentiment without sentimentality as he conveys the inevitability of loss and the divisions of class with sadness but not bitterness.
Emotionally complex, politically intelligent, beautifully written: Among the best from a novelist in the classic American tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61032-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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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