Less ambitious and satisfying than Auster's last two novels (In The Country of Last Things, Moon Palace), this equally improbable tale seems a bit hastily conceived, with too many blurry edges and no compelling center to keep things in focus. Jim Nashe, a 33-year-old Boston firefighter down on his luck, decides to give his life over to chance. In rapid order, his wife walks out on him and their two-year-old daughter; he inherits $200,000 from a father he hasn't seen in 30 years; he leaves his daughter with his sister in Minnesota; and he begins zigzagging across America in a brandnew Saab. With less than $20,000 left, the rambling Nashe picks up a hitchhiker ("A wiry little runt") named Jack "Jackpot" Pozzi—a traveling poker pro and fellow member of, as he calls it, "The International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs." Jim becomes partners with Jack, staking him in a match with two eccentric, lottery-winning millionaires in remote Pennsylvania. An "atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust" hovers over their strange estate, where one works on his visionary model of a city and the other houses a vast collection of historical ephemera ("a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness"). In their ultimate game of chance, the young partners lose all, and then some, becoming virtual slaves of the obnoxious rich men. Soon Jim and Jack are plunged into a world of backbreaking labor and arbitrary authority, until Jack is beaten senseless for trying to escape, and Jim becomes "crazy with loneliness," a prisoner in his "private hell." When Jim wins his final freedom, he celebrates with an unpredictable act of violence that affirms his assumption of control. But by this point, the novel has abandoned dramatic plausibility for some elusive, abstract notions about randomness and personal responsibility. Auster's in thrall to an idea here, and the more traditional aspects of narrative (plot, character, etc.) suffer as a consequence; without being redeemed by alternative ones. Despite some intrigue, a disappointing work.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0140154078
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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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