Sharply observed and dryly funny, but it somewhat too aptly illustrates Julie's warning to Luke that real life is not like...
A highly touted Bright Young Brit profiles six aimless friends marking time in Essex.
Actually, about two thirds of the way through the story they pile into a camper van and head toward Wales to meet a Chinese healer Luke hopes will cure his rare, fatal allergy to sunlight. Until he gets under the blankets in the van, though, Luke is stuck in his room watching TV, chatting on the Internet, and waiting for visits from best friend Julie and sort-of girlfriend Leanne. It’s not much of a life for a 25-year-old, but then Julie, a math and science whiz who deliberately flunked her university entrance exams, is a waitress, while Leanne is a nightmarishly rigid sales clerk in a Blockbuster Video. (Her browbeating a customer over an obviously incorrect late fee is one of the funniest scenes here.) David, a cook at the restaurant where Julie works, has testicular cancer; Charlotte, just back after fleeing a year ago when her boyfriend died suddenly, is glamorous but sad. Only Leanne's good-natured cousin Chantel has any luck: she just won the lottery and bought the camper for the Wales trip. Getting out of town initially doesn’t help anyone. They’re creeping along backroads because Julie, in addition to refusing to eat prepared food (someone might spike it with LSD) or take express trains (they might crash), is as terrified of highways as she is of storms. Naturally, they leave in the middle of a downpour and encounter flooded roads. Nonetheless, Thomas (Dead Clever, 2003, etc.) doles out various tentative redemptions to her characters; they're appropriate and quite touching, but don't much lighten the gray portrait she’s etched of young people adrift in an indifferent-to-hostile society, taking little pleasure from the drugs and sex they casually indulge in, fond of each other (possibly excepting the bitchy Leanne) but unsure how that helps.
Sharply observed and dryly funny, but it somewhat too aptly illustrates Julie's warning to Luke that real life is not like TV: “Stuff happens and there just is no structure.”Pub Date: June 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-7531-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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