Nothing clarifies and focuses a superior first novel like its successor: all the cells of the former are stained by the latter's stresses, repetitions; and a pattern ought to start to emerge. Well, that's happened here—and the news is that Birdy was no fluke. Wharton has a real theme—the joys and abysmal pain of containing alternate realities within one life—and he has the continued means to bring it across powerfully. In Birdy, the wish to be a bird inhabited a boy; in Dad, the desire to have lived a better, different life floods through the consciousness of an old man under great stress. Narrating is John Tremont, Jr., 52, a painter who lives in Paris and is called back to southern California when his mother has a series of serious heart attacks. A frightened, fragile, high-strung, and domineering woman, Mom can't stand her invalidism. And when the far gentler Dad suddenly takes ill too-bladder tumors—and begins to abruptly fail (the sudden onset of horrifying senility and coma), John Jr. is in the custodial role of helplessly overseeing his parents' degeneration—that trauma which all adults fear and are loath to consider. (Complicating the situation is the arrival of John's own son, dropped-out from college, who puts him into a double bind of generations forward and back: how can he be a father if, at 52, he's so concerned but ultimately ineffectual a son?) This far along, then, Wharton has been providing a grimly specific, daily, realistic portrait of the horrors of oldness and dying: the dealing with incontinence, with unfeeling doctors, the impatience, the being constantly on-call, the irreversibility of the decline. And then, about mid-way, miraculously, Dad pulls out of his senile coma and seems to recover completely. In fact, he becomes more alive than ever: spry, mischievous, randy, creative, antic—a Pan far more spirited than the already scared-witless and emotionally costive Mom can bear. Even worse for her, Dad now admits to a lifelong feeling of having had another, near-duplicate life and family across the country—in Cape May, New Jersey! Delusion? Possibility? As Dad's freedom, real or imagined, is quickly beaten back into insensateness and eventual death by Mom, we watch this lovely flicker being snuffed out. And as incontestably awful and frightening as such a common situation is—death of spirit by family, that is—Wharton invests it with a hint of yearning and mirage simply by piling one plain, real occurrence atop another: he's a superb fabulist, we're learning, of the mundane, American, no-frills existence. True, alternating chapters narrated by Tremont's son, meant as a foil, don't really work (just as the double narrator in parts of Birdy didn't)—but this is only a minor flaw. So: a major novel from a writer whose magnitude has now been gloriously confirmed—in a haunting book full of pain and misery, but one which (thanks to Wharton's method, skill, and vista) you have to be reminded to be depressed over.
Pub Date: May 28, 1981
ISBN: 155704256X
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1981
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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