Soapy first novel about life, love, passion, and perversion in a decaying mill-town in upstate New York (Mohawk by name). Two cousins, Diana Wood and Anne Younger, are each burdened by the repressiveness of life with their aging, neurotic, and manipulative mothers, and they're also unhappy in love. On double dates way back in high school, things should have miraculously sorted themselves out, but didn't: the beautiful Anne really loves Dan (and vice versa), but Dan marries the good, plain cousin Diana instead (whom he only sort of loves); and the terribly intelligent but doomed-to-disappointment Anne errs by marrying Dallas, an irresponsible and at best half-charming town rake, drinker, and auto mechanic. With these marriages in place, life goes on: Anne and Dallas (after having a son) get divorced; Dan becomes a wheelchair victim and muddles on with Diana (along with her hypochondriacal, money-draining mother); only much later, at book's end, does Diana herself sadly but conveniently die, with the result that Anne and Dan can at last move beyond furtive consummations in front of the late-night fireplace and move away together to Phoenix, Arizona. Before such bittersweet bliss, though, much else happens, and deep, dark secrets emerge, most having to do with a Snopes-like family by name of Grouse. The town's speechless retard, nicknamed Wild Bill (who once upon a time loved Anne from afar and stood mooning under her window), turns out to have been fist-clobbered into retardation by his sleazy father, Rory Grouse, co-worker in the leather mills with Anne's father. There's character-blackmail afoot, it turns out, having to do with the years-long theft of company leather skins by Grouse, and with Anne's father's principled refusal to take part. Anne's draft-dodging and hippy son, in the later Vietnam years, will half-inadvertently reveal the whole mystery—along with a welter of bullets, two dead Grouse brothers (one the emotionally crippled town cop), the dead (and still speechless) Wild Bill, and the frosting-on-the-cake info that Rory Grouse has helped himself to his own granddaughter's sexual favors for quite a while. Workmanlike writing for lovers of the well-atmosphered small-town saga with not a cliche unturned. For those idle hours between daytime soaps.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1986
ISBN: 0679753826
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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