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

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The Handmaid's Tale

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 tiny step removed from red.

Rating:

Not Remotely Controlled

Notes on Television
By Lee Seigel
Basic Books

It’s not clear to me why people enjoy reading most arts criticism. Is it because, in the midst of our frenzied rodent relay, getting the thumbs-up before making the effort to see a movie or concert ensures that even our leisure time will be spent productively? Is it because measures of worth that come from outsiders — even lowbrow pontificators like Richard Roper — have more authority than our own personal preferences? Or is it just that we’re all looking for someone to agree with us?

There are probably as many reasons for reading criticism as there are for writing it. But, recently, after devouring Lee Siegel’s collection of critiques, Not Remotely Controlled, Notes on Television, I discovered one that hadn’t previously occurred to me: because the writing is great.

I don’t mean great in the witty-but-catty tradition of Dorothy Parker or the fictional Addison DeWitt. I mean great in the tradition of your smartest friend who really should be a published novelist, but who hasn’t been able to pull that off, and instead, diverts all their intellectual power into the analysis of pop culture. The kind of friend with whom you could spend a week just sitting on a rock listening to their soliloquies on insipid television shows, because the breadth of their knowledge of literature, history and the human condition allows them to imbue even the basest of clown shows with meaning.

Lee Siegel is such a philosopher critic.

He begins a review of the long-running TV show “Friends” with a brainy discussion of the failure of Richard Serra’s avant garde sculpture, Tilted Arc, to capture broad appeal with the New Yorkers for whom it was erected in 1981 — and by whom it was dismantled five years later. Then, after a long discussion that includes contrasting nice Ross and Rachel to sophisticated Big and Carrie from "Sex in the City," and then pointing out that all discussions of taste in America are veiled discussions of morality (and class), he finally sides with the “Friends” over the sophisticates. Or, more precisely, while Richard Serra declared, "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing," Siegel, thinks pleasing is not such a bad thing after all.

“Friends” aside, Siegel, an editor at The New Republic and a writer for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker, is no cheerleader for televised banality. For instance, in the chapter of essays on reality television he reminds us both of the lies inherent in the underlying premise of each of the reality shows he reviews, and of the hollow endgame produced by the celebration of humiliation and failure that is their hallmark.

He loves the sophisticated HBO sitcom “Extras,” because the star, Ricky Gervais, plays a modern version of the put-upon “little man.” The comedy in this show is derived from, among other things, taking potshots at the “big men,” who oppress us all. On the other hand, Siegel does not like the equally-tony HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” because, this show’s star, Larry David, plays a “big man” perpetually vexed by the fact that all the money in the world still can’t make the “little men”— the service employees, the secretaries, the wives and the racial minorities — with whom he’s forced to interact, take his shit without fighting back.

It’s easy to conclude from these beautifully written essays that Siegel’s natural inclination leads him to prefer the highbrow. Yet, whether he’s dissecting the comedy series “Reno 911” or a documentary on the Pope, his humanity consistently leads him to praise any entertainment that demonstrates genuine compassion.

I would not normally advocate wasting one’s time reading about television. In general, TV is a real soul-sapper — and it already takes up too much of everyone's time. However, the essays in Not Remotely Controlled are worth reading because they transcend the medium they explore. If TV deadens our minds and spirits, these essays do much to revive them.

But, if you’re just looking for someone to agree with you, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Rating:

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BLESSEDLY BRIEF

Amandine
Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, or George Sand to you, was one of those people who is born with exceptional inner strength. Not just the strength to endure a bad childhood, a bad marriage or a national revolution, all of which she did in nineteenth century France, but the inner power to assert her personality onto everyone and everything around her and leave an indelible mark. Sand is remembered as the author of almost 90 novels and the lover of such notable contemporaries as Chopin and Flaubert. But more than that, as Benita Eisler illustrates in her well-written biography, Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand (Counterpoint) this fashion-forward cross-dresser was filled with a fathomless passion for life that expressed itself in every aspect of her existence.

First of all there was the writing. Busy though she was, Sand was prolific. In addition to her novels she was a journalist and, at one time, a magazine publisher. Then there was the political activism. There was no working-class uprising she didn’t champion with words and deeds. And, of course, there was the long list of lovers, a list she started before she got married and did not stop adding to until the end of her life. She loved much and many, but preferred artists to other types. Her (mostly) men were musicians and writers.

She was also a mother. But, like many creative people, she was too much of a narccissist to be much of a parent. Sure, she could be a lot of fun, putting on plays with her kids in the drawing room or taking them horseback riding, but nothing was more important than the affection and attention of her lovers. Perhaps this was why Sand had such a terrible relationship with her only daughter. Solange, who was, by all accounts but Sand’s, smart and prettier than her mother. No one who works that hard to be the center of attention needs competition, particularly from her own offspring. Her son got the bulk of her love, but little of the drive or talent.

Much of the book recounts her long, fascinating and tempestuous relationship with the composer Frederic Chopin. In many ways these two were ill-suited for each other. And Sand probably had less actual sex with him than with previous conquests. Still, her passion for this consumptive Pole probably prolonged his life and allowed him to write some of the world’s most celebrated piano compositions.

Sand was a mass of messy ideas and impulses. Yet, she led a life that was filled with accomplishments that would seem stunning even in the twenty-first century. That she did so almost two-hundred years ago, and as a woman, marks her as someone still worth reading about.

Penguin has released a series of small paperback books by a group of authors who, as they say, “enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted.” The list includes such provocateurs as Thomas Paine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius and George Orwell. The four essays that comprise, Why I Write, their Orwell offering, work as a credible snapshot of his contribution to Western thought and place the genesis of his ideas squarely within the era during which he lived.

In the title piece he says, “I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.” His reasons are, “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse” and “political purpose.”

Certainly Orwell wrote to sway the politics of his time. The longest essay in this book,” The Lion and the Unicorn,” written during WWII, expresses the hope that his nation’s conflict with Hitler — and the fascism Nazis represented — would turn England’s working and fighting classes away from exclusionary capitalism and towards inclusive socialism. “England,” he writes, “is a family with the wrong members in control.” (And he didn’t even live to see Margaret Thatcher’s England.)

Short and bittersweet, Why I Write provides a few more reasons to love the man who warned us about the “Big Brother” who, as predicted, now rules almost every aspect of our lives. Let’s just hope Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, isn’t that prophetic.