With his labored, sometimes overwrought style, second-novelist Lewis (Sister, 1993) gussies up a rather ordinary tale of deception and intrigue: a study in identity that never fully explores the unreliability of its strange narrator. The first-person story is told in the voice of a fortyish woman, originally named Caroline Harrison, who—we find out by the end—is speaking to her teenage daughter, explaining her aimless life of reinvented selves and a crime committed nearly 20 years earlier. As a 27-year-old fleeing a bad marriage in New York City, Caroline literally crashes in Sugartown, Texas, a small, idyllic community where she finds work as an orderly in an old-age home and friendship with a fellow drifter named Bonnie Moore. The novel veers into improbability when the two women get caught up in a Sugartown riot (over police brutality), during which Bonnie dies and Caroline bashes in the skull of a policeman. Assuming Bonnie's identity, Caroline heads back east, eventually ending up in upstate New York, where an old codger from the nursing home has sent her with a mysterious package. In a remote house in the woods, Caroline can't figure out whether she's a prisoner or a guest of the three ex-cons holed up there; nor is she certain what they're doing with the eight-year-old who's living with them. Eventually, the trio lets her in on their scam—they're counterfeiters, not the pornographers she'd suspected. As soon as they finish their work, they head west, where, with a new identity, Caroline gives birth to a daughter fathered by one of the cons—the same daughter to whom she directs this entire narrative, an explanation of their endless moves and of the cops who finally burst through the door. The elements of the thriller—unexpected turns and surprising coincidences—serve to propel a novel that never seems entirely sure of itself. Despite bursts of sharp imagery and startling turns of phrase, Lewis's odd book falls short both as art and mystery.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60109-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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