The maze of memory is an ideal setting for Oates’ trademark mixture of melodrama and pathos.
Oates explores the lives of an amnesiac and the neuroscientist who studies and adores him.
Elihu "Eli" Hoopes, who will be forever known in the annals of science as E.H., loses his short-term memory as a consequence of encephalitis at age 37. The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, this would-be leftist–turned-stockbroker contracted the fever at the Hoopes’ lodge on Lake George. Referred in 1965 to psychologists at the University Neurological Institute, he becomes, in effect, a career guinea pig, subjected daily to various tests by the illustrious Dr. Milton Ferris and his staff, which includes 24-year-old graduate student Margot Sharpe. However avidly he takes notes and makes sketches, Eli can't retain memories of anyone he meets. He greets everyone as if for the first time, with an affable “hel-lo.” Where most of his family is concerned, the forgetting is mutual—they have abandoned him to the care of an aunt. Eli ruminates obsessively about his past since his memories of the years before 1965 are intact. Many of his charcoal drawings depict the figure of a drowned girl, around 11 years old, beneath the surface of a stream near Lake George. Eli’s italicized thoughts about this girl introduce a murder mystery: his cousin Gretchen disappeared one summer, and the Hoopeses hushed it up. Is Eli the killer? As Margot ages and advances in academia, her private life becomes increasingly fraught—she has an affair with Ferris, a married womanizer, and allows him to pillage her ideas but refuses to expose him—and then she begins an affair with Eli. Oates excels at creating spooky, off-kilter atmospherics, less so at funneling scientific data onto the page in digestible chunks.
The maze of memory is an ideal setting for Oates’ trademark mixture of melodrama and pathos.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241609-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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