After the flashy debut of her story collection, Bad Behavior, Gaitskill's first novel seems downright demure. Despite its disturbing scene of S-M, it's mostly a thoughtful and eloquent psychological profile of two strangely connected lives. What draws the two girls of the title together is the popular philosopher Anna Granite (a thinly disguised version of Ayn Rand). Justine Shade, a pretty and slender part-time secretary, also writes for a Village Voice-like tabloid; her investigation into the dying cult of Granite brings her into contact with Dorothy Storm (nÇe Footie), an obese Wall St. word-processor who changed her life for the better when she dropped out of college and became part of Granite's inner circle. The long middle section of the novel, acutely observed forays into the two women's pasts, reveals their oddly parallel lives. Despite dramatic differences in class and family life, both women have been victimized: Dorothy by her sexually abusive father, and Justine by her emotionally damaging parents—cool and distant, and oh-so liberal-minded. Both imaginative, articulate, and literate girls, they find themselves outsiders among their peers: one shunned for her apparent physical difference; the other appalled by the cruelty and betrayal that young people are given to. If Dorothy punishes herself by eating her way into oblivion, Justine begins to discover kinky sexuality: first, through masturbatory fantasies of torture, and then by acting out some bizarre adolescent rites. As adults, Justine continues to subject herself to violent, degrading sex, while Dorothy has found psychic liberation through the erotically charged ideas of Granite, who teaches her how life can matter if we decide to make it matter, and other such "definitist" nostrums. Meanwhile, Justine publishes her smart and cynical article, which properly debunks the pseudo-philosophy of Granite, and betrays the oft-abused Dorothy. But the latter's rage subsides when she becomes the very screwed-up Justine's literal savior. Gaitskill fully understands the psycho-dynamics of being a misfit, and hence the appeal of such as Rand. But her fine and disturbing novel is also a stunning work of the imagination—genuine and luminous.
Pub Date: Feb. 27, 1991
ISBN: 671-68540-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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