Baxter is a master of stealth, easing us by degrees from a world shaped by love toward a creepy nihilism. His deft fusion of...
What seems like a safe haven for a loving young couple is shattered by a high-school dropout’s suicide: Baxter’s latest follows The Feast of Love, an NBA finalist in 2000.
Saul and Patsy met at Northwestern, where they quickly fell in love, animal passions blending with a rare intimacy of mind and spirit. Now here they are, young marrieds, still passionate, living in semi-rural Michigan; Saul is a high-school teacher in a featureless city. Though an angst-ridden urban Jew, Saul enjoys the “indifference” of the Heartland; besides, he’s on a mission to undo “the dumbness.” How ironic, then, that he rolls the car after some serious drinking. He and Patsy find refuge in the home of a former (dumb) student, already married to his high-school sweetheart. Saul admires their simple ways and becomes a voyeur, detouring past their “damnable house of happiness,” never dreaming he will soon acquire a voyeur himself. Patsy has had a baby girl and Saul takes some baby pictures into his remedial English class, whose dumbest student, Gordy Himmelman, plainly loathes him. Gordy starts showing up on their front lawn, staring, immobile; one time he produces an unloaded gun. Saul drives the parentless Gordy back to his aunt Brenda, a benighted hag-like waitress, but Gordy keeps returning until one day, with the storybook family watching, he blows his brains out. In death, Gordy becomes the object of a high-school cult. Kids bleach their hair and call themselves “Himmels.” Saul, who has figured out that Gordy was “offering himself . . . for adoption,” becomes a scapegoat. The climax comes on Halloween when eight kids drive up, arson and worse on their minds. Saul, drawing on dramatic and parenting skills he never knew he had, brilliantly defuses the crisis.
Baxter is a master of stealth, easing us by degrees from a world shaped by love toward a creepy nihilism. His deft fusion of a love story with a post-Columbine psychodrama is a major achievement.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41029-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
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