If there are such things as "poet's novels," Margaret Atwood writes them. Each of hers has a controlling, spooking metaphor; here the central idea is that today's men and women live in an era that is without the consolations of history, in which old forms are dying out, not to reappear. So it's no accident that the women here work with remnants of the past: Elizabeth Shoenhof, a director of a Toronto museum, is married to Nate, once a lawyer but now a maker of chic wooden toys. Both have had and will still have other lovers, but they're struggling to stay living in the same house for the sake of the children. Elizabeth's latest lover has just killed himself; Nate's most recent girlfriend has dumped him. And when Nate then goes toward museum paleontologist Lesje, Elizabeth retaliates with a calculated seduction of Lesje's live-in boyfriend. The actions are unsubtle and desperate, the air bleak, the light almost wholly interior. The pre-history of emotions and social codes here is entropic, using up and discarding modern feelings without ready alternatives: the only saving grace to Nate-and-Elizabeth's grotesque marriage is its eventual guaranteed extinction. To this end, Atwood leaves no self-doubt uncovered, and there are chapters—it's a book of chapters above all, some of them memorable—in which the characters numbly go through rituals (Elizabeth, for instance, visiting the planetarium, staring up at the faked stars) that are as spare and just as poems, veined with their own strange blood. Yet, for all the generosity, such unrelenting social and emotional chaos makes the book very confining: everyone's center is constantly being stirred, the struggles slow and nearly unbearable, until the entire novel comes to seem like one large tar pit. And though this is an effect Atwood no doubt wants, it's one that nevertheless makes for a gooey, close read. Monumentally depressing, thoroughly gifted work from a very special novelist.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0385491107
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1979
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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