Boy, are my arms tired! Spinster Librarian. Book Reviews.

PAGE ONE NEXT

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

By Margaret Atwood
Anchor Books

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s frighteningly prophetic story about the loss of women’s freedom in the wake of a fascist take-over of the United States, was first published in 1986. In those days, the idea that the U.S. government could eye on old books imprison and torture people who disagreed with its views or force women to follow reproductive laws written by Christian fanatics seemed far-fetched. But times change, and the bleak existence she depicted for both men and women no longer seems like a remote fiction dreamed up by a feminist Cassandra. In fact, a world in which ecological degradation so threatens the future of the human race that governments might begin to pass draconian laws to virtually enslave women in an attempt to reverse the effects of low birth numbers in the western world might not be science fiction after all.

The events that lead up to the story Atwood’s “handmaid” tells sound all too familiar. First, “portable” money is eliminated. Everyone is paid for work and purchases items through the use of electronic cards or numbers. Next, the congress and president are murdered in a bloody coup. “They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time,” writes Atwood with chilling prescience. “That was when, “she continues, “they suspended the Constitution.”

“They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some kind of direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

Soon the media is censored. Citizens are required to carry electronic identification cards. Finally women’s access to their money is simply cut off overnight, and they lose the freedom to come and go as they please. It is at this point that females of childbearing age are separated and reeducated, using creepy pseudo-Christian rhetoric, to become compliant baby machines for the newly formed country of Gilead. Those women who have no viable eggs to share— as well as men who resist the new ideology — are sent to live in toxic enclaves where their work consists of cleaning up nuclear and other poisonous waste. Being a walking womb is not that appealing, but for most it’s still better than the slow, painful death that comes as a result being sent to one of these “colonies.”

The handmaid of the title gives her accounting of these historical events, but mostly the reader is led through her bleak, day-to-day existence — one lived as a prisoner who must censor every thought and emotion in order to please the powerful Commander of the regime and his wife to whom she is the assigned baby-maker. The Commander uses her, as powerful men have always used women. His wife abuses her, because she symbolizes the wife’s own failure to make babies, which is the only job of importance for women in Gileadean society. The handmaid lives in fear that each bit of conversation that strays from proscribed topics, or any bit of eye contact that lasts a moment too long could be the subtle agent that leads to a fate even worse than the one in which she already finds herself.

Atwood’s tale is told as a series of non-linear flashbacks, a form that serves to keep the suspense alert level at bloody red —like the garments the women in this novel are forced to wear to signify their fertility. And, like all of this author’s work, the writing is precise and coldly compelling.

So, think about the tale of Gilead the next time you’re sitting at your computer, transferring your electronic pay to your electronic creditors, and the Homeland Security terror alert is at orange. After all, orange is only one step away from red.

Rating:

PAGES 1-2-3-4

BLESSEDLY BRIEF

Anne Panning describes the human condition with more insight than most in her collection of short stories, Super America published by University of Georgia Press. A justifiable winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Super America introduces us mainly to couples, straight and gay, who struggle to survive through affecting circumstances both ordinarily and extraordinarily harrowing.

In one, a gay man befriends a couple that loses their wedding ring on the beach in Hawaii during a tsunami, with touching consequences for all. In another, a woman who has created the perfect, suburban life, she thinks, has to deal with the imperfections of unruly neighbors who throw a wrench into her plans for Martha Stewart-like bliss. In another, a woman trying to retain the affections of her husband spends the proceeds from a lawsuit on a restaurant he wants to open that sells only frog legs.

Car accidents figure prominently in these stories. In one, a woman loses her husband when his bike is hit by a truck. In the final, novella-length tale, a couple on the skids is forced to reconcile temporarily when the husband loses his legs in a terrible highway accident.

These are just plot points, and they are, by themselves interesting. But what makes these stories stand apart is Panning’s clean, beautiful writing, her humor and importantly, her palpable empathy.

Mort Zachter’s memoir, Dough, (University of Georgia Press) is built upon an appealing premise. It goes something like this: A young man’s hard-working immigrant family runs a commercial bakery in Brooklyn; two uncles and his parents work selling bread seven days a week; they live in squalid, near-poverty; the uncle who runs the bakery finally becomes senile and is put in retirement home; the young man, now a married CPA in his 30s discovers that both uncles were really multi-millionaires.

As a story, it contains every tried-and-true plot point one could want. It’s a rags-to-riches saga. It reveals family secrets. It provides historical anecdotes for color. Yes, it has everything except the one thing that would make you actually finish the book: compelling prose.

It turns out, Zachter always wanted to be a writer, but his family’s penuriousness forced him, instead, to learn accounting and then law. So, by the time he came into wealth he had missed several decades’ worth of writing practice. Like many neophyte writers, he makes the fatal mistake of over-explaining. For instance, in one boring passage in which he describes hiring a home-care worker he says “The morning the service began, I made sure I was in the apartment before the scheduled start time. When the buzzer downstairs rang, I ran down and opened the lobby door for a gentle-looking woman who reminded me of the actress Esther Rolle: she was heavyset with short-cropped hair and a smile that gave me hope this plan would work out.”

I’m pretty sure that if my merciless, former writing teacher had read this passage she would have told Mort to cut out the shit about waiting in the apartment, hearing the buzzer, going to the door, opening the door and then stopping the motion a little longer to share a vaguely racist memory. “Cut to the chase," would have been her advice. “The home care worker arrived,” would have been mine.

Dough plods along in this manner, obscuring a potentially interesting story by describing loads of tedious, mechanical motions and shallow reflections. It’s true that everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone should tell his or hers without the help of a ghostwriter, or at least a good editor.