A sexy but self-conscious recreation of post–World War II European malaise.
In postwar Italy, a renowned poet/translator with suicidal tendencies and an enormous sex drive enjoys a love triangle with two American actresses who happen to be sisters.
Loosely basing her fictional Dante Sabato on Cesare Pavese, whose love affair with an American expat actress ended shortly before his death, McPhee (No Ordinary Matter, 2004, etc.) creates a jaded, cynical romantic hero with mildly perverse sexual habits and enormous guilt. In 1948, Dante meets the Godfrey sisters, who have moved to Rome after faltering careers in Hollywood. Their names reflect their very different natures. Gladys has a sexual appetite as large and kinky as Dante’s, while Prudence offers intellect and love. Dante quickly beds Gladys, then works on wooing Prudence. Soon the three are ensconced in an unspoken ménage a trios. Dante engages in a publicly acknowledged love affair with Prudence while meeting his more carnal needs with Gladys, and every other woman who crosses his path. In between trysts and literary gatherings—there is much intellectual and cultural name-dropping of everyone from T.S. Eliot to Errol Flynn to Dante’s beloved, elusive Hemingway—Dante reviews his life with dissatisfaction. He feels guilty that as a young boy he hesitated before saving his neighbor from a beating. He blames the accidental, perhaps suicidal death of his first sweetheart, the lynchpin of a love triangle with his best friend, on his aloof reaction when she announced her pregnancy. He refuses to take credit for his resistance fighting against the fascists, portraying his heroism in the darkest possible light. Dante’s interval of joy with the Godfreys ends when Gladys becomes pregnant and marries an American she’s met on a movie set. The sisters return to America. Dante takes to the sea in a dinghy. By then, put off by his world-weary, self-centered voice as narrator, readers may be rooting for Dante’s suicide.
A sexy but self-conscious recreation of post–World War II European malaise.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58243-375-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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