From the very first sequence here (a white milk-cart horse bounds over the newly-built Brooklyn Bridge in a bid for freedom), Helprin makes it clear that he's out to conquer the Latin-American-style genre of magic realism—with splendid worlds of the impossible-made-possible, with concentrated storytelling designed to vibrate and shine on each page. The white horse effortlessly becomes mythic Athansor, who can also fly; he will rescue a virtuous young 19th-century burglar named Peter Lake from a mob of his evil ex-cronies, the Short Tails; Peter will later hide up behind the stars set into the ceiling of Grand Central Station, meeting newspaper-tycoon Isaac Penn's beautiful, dying daughter Beverly (who will become his Beatrice). And then a huge cloud-wall imprisons Peter and preserves him from eternal death. . . to spit him out nearly a hundred years later, near the millennial year of 2000—when New York City is facing destruction from its rampaging poor, from its corrupt power-brokers (e.g., a boobishly villainous newspaper publisher a la Rupert Murdoch), and from apocalyptic winters. There's a magic salver, a rainbow-tech bridge; there are valiant, virtuous heroes and heroines. And Helprin tirelessly, artfully strings variation upon variation—the fabulous recapitulating itself in different disguises and in lovely, serene yet vibrant, harmonic sentences. (Especially notable: the scenes involving travel or machinery.) Yet, for all this surface appeal, there's little substance here, with New York City's glories and injustices the only real subject-matter. If anything, in fact, the novel seems to be a celebration of Helprin's empyrean, breathtaking technique—his zeal for recapitulation, for enchanting the reader into timeless innocence and memory, for putting his sparkly material through hoop after hoop of painless fabulizing. And the result is talemaking of avid genius, rarely silly or cheap, frequently stunningly poetic—but also more than a little stupefying and show-offy, without the core of seriousness that gave focus and integrity to John Crowley's similar Little, Big (1981).
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1983
ISBN: 0156031191
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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