Price (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers) left the Bronx behind with Ladies Man, putting all his remarkably pent-up novelistic energies onto the shoulders of increasingly articulate but shudderingly jumpy young men—the newest of which is Peter Keller, this book's narrator and (in a way) only character. Peter is the first college grad in his lower-middle-class Yonkers family—and as if that is some obscure sin, he promptly sabotages a brightish future by taking demeaning jobs (the Post Office, telephone solicitation). Then, to provoke his wimpy father and stepmother even further, Peter gets himself into real trouble by making bomb threats on the phone. He's caught, probationed—and, in the worst of several plot-lurches here, he's rescued by his friend Fat Jack, who (as department chairman) hires Peter to be a freshman-composition instructor at his alma mater in upstate New York. And there, in the small college town, Peter comes to meet older-woman Kim Fonesca—who's separated from husband Tony (a streetwise yet failed writer also on the faculty), who writes stories herself (more successfully than Tony), but who soon reveals that she needs a regular beat-me-then-stroke-me cycle from men. Hall a dozen times in this longish book, then, Price fastens onto a meld of intricate emotional needs—ambition, masochism, self-destruction—and astounding hysterics: Peter with his parents; Kim's sexual requirements; Peter's obsessive need to never let things well enough alone; Tony's desperate search for his once-glimpsed promise. Each time, however, the tension and energy collapse: each emotional drama gets caught against the wall as Price revolves the door too fast. And, since everyone in the novel—like Peter—turns out to be an obscure sinner-and-atoner, a whining monotony eventually takes over. Still, there are wonderful pages here: Price in his junior-Lenny-Bruce suit halls clown everything second-rate in extraordinary paragraphs of description; Peter at his best recalls some of Philip Roth's men, who are never unaware of how terribly they are mucking things up. And, though flabby and badly timed as a novel (the good climax comes far too late to be truly effective), this is grimly involving in fits and starts—and evidence of a stretching, growing, if problematic talent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0312566514
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
