Taylor gives her narrator a singular voice and dares the world to listen.
This story, told by the younger half of a runaway mother-and-child duo, provides an enigmatic narrator with an opportunity to challenge readers’ assumptions about family, gender, and home.
Taylor’s (The Shore, 2015) storyteller, the androgynous Alex, recounts (from a future vantage point) the sequence of unsettling events they encountered while roaming the country with “Ma,” their mother. Ma and the barely pubescent Alex abruptly depart their stifling home, leaving Alex’s elusive father behind, and spend the next few years living a hand-to-mouth existence on the road, following an itinerary Ma has charted on a mysteriously annotated map. As they crisscross the country, Ma settles scores, pays debts, and pays it forward while Alex deals with the effects of deracination and gender fluidity. Ma’s quest, focused on reconnecting with a series of women friends—the “Lauras”—from her hardscrabble youth, provides both mother and child with myriad opportunities for self-revelation. Taylor’s quiet, precise prose creates a sense of dreary place after place on the pair’s odyssey and never conveys a clue about Alex’s anatomy. Rather than serving as a parlor trick, Alex’s androgyny works as a reminder about preconceived notions of identity and offers readers a narrative stripped of gender-specific conventions; Alex’s ambiguous, aching forays into the realms of sexuality and human relations speak to universal truths about trust as well as lust. The realities of living life with a serial bolter reveal to Alex the myriad ways in which a home can be assembled and reassembled over time as Taylor propels the duo past external and internal mile markers. Some stops on the journey may seem superfluous or less important than others that are more finely drawn. Taylor, however, never allows her travelers to veer too far from the path they need to follow.
Taylor gives her narrator a singular voice and dares the world to listen.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49685-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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