In 2017, Margaret Atwood is ascendant. The New Yorker has dubbed her the Prophet of Dystopia. The upcoming Hulu adaptation of her most well-known book, the feminist speculative novel The Handmaids Tale, long in the works, has turned out to be almost ludicrously well-timed to the political moment. Atwood, who has also written chilling speculative fiction about other timely issues (such as climate change), seems prescient to rattled liberals in a post-Trump election world.Everyone wants her thoughts on whats happening and whats to come.The media can be fickle, however.The Handmaids Talehas become an oft-studied and -cited modern classic, but its initial reception didnt necessarily foretell its induction into the canon. The New Yorker, per a perusal of its archives from the time, didnt review it at all; The New York Times published a sniffy takedown by Mary McCarthy. At the time, the Christian Science Monitor described the book as mostly well-received by critics; meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that reviews had been poor enough as to make Atwood defensive during an interview with the publication.We dug through the archives to remember what critics were saying aboutThe Handmaids Taleback in 1986, when it was published in the U.S., and we found everything from tepid reactions to outright pans to glowing odes. The concept of a dystopia premised on the theocratic oppression of women, perhaps unsurprisingly, has always been polarizing.Below, check out a selection of the original reviews of The Handmaids Tale:The Ecstatic:Just as the world of Orwells 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwoods handmaid. She has succeeded in finding a voice for her heroine that is direct, artless, utterly convincing. It is the voice of a woman we might know, of someone very close to us. In fact, it is Offreds poignant sense of time that gives this novel its peculiar power. The immense changes in her life have come so fast that she is still in a state of shock and disbelief as she relates to us what she sees around her.-Joyce Johnson, The Washington Post[A]mong other things, it is a political tract deploring nuclear energy, environmental waste, and antifeminist attitudes.But it so much more than that ' a taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words. It has a sense of humor about itself, as well as an ambivalence toward even its worst villains, who arent revealed as such until the very end. Best of all, it holds out the possibility of redemption. After all, the Handmaid is also a writer. She has written this book. She may have survived.-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TimesMargaret Atwoods cautionary tale of postfeminist future shock pictures a nation formed by a backlash against feminism, but also by nuclear accidents, chemical pollution, radiation poisoning, a host of our present problems run amok. Ms. Atwood draws as well on New England Puritan history for her repressive 22[n]d-century society. Her deft sardonic humor makes much of the action and dialogue in the novel funny and ominous at the same time.-NYT Editors Choice pick, 1986The Ehhhh: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 ' its got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percys Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world thats like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.-KirkusSome details of Atwoods bizarre anti-Utopia are at least as repellent as those in such forerunners as Aldous Huxleys Brave New World in 1932 and George Orwells 1984 16 years later. Those two novels have come to be seen as fiercely moral tracts that jarred their readers to awaken them. Will Atwood, as different from Huxley and Orwell as they were from each other, join them in the accepted ranks of those disguised idealists who image the future as a nightmare in order that it may remain just that ' a fantasy' Certainly the early reviews of her book have been mainly positive.-Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science MonitorMargaret Atwoods new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia [...] As a dystopia, this is a thinly textured one. [...] But if Offred is a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith, and Gilead seems at times to be only a coloring book version of Oceania, it may be because Atwood means to do more than scare us about the obvious consequences of a Falwellian coup dtat.-Barbara Ehrenreich, The New Republic[Atwoods] regime is a hodgepodge: a theocracy thats not recognizably Christian, that most Christians dont accept; a repressive measure borrowed from South Africa; an atrocity adopted by the Romanians. With no unifying vision, the center doesnt hold.-Alix Madrigal, The San Francisco ChronicleAs a cautionary tale, Atwoods novel lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. It warns against too much: heedless sex, excessive morality, chemical and nuclear pollution. All of these may be worthwhile targets, but such a future seems more complicated than dramatic. But Offreds narrative is fascinating in a way that transcends tense and time: the record of an observant soul struggling against a harsh, mysterious world.-Paul Gray, TIMEThe Harsh:The Handmaids Tale is watchable, but its also paranoid poppycockjust like the book. The actors are imprisoned in Atwoods grimly inhuman design.[...]What finally takes the cake for absurdity is a subplot featuring Aidan Quinn as Richardsons handsome savior. Its as if Atwood, after all that didactic scrubbing, couldnt quite wash the princess fantasy out of her story. The Handmaids Tale is a tract that strives for sensitivity ' it lacks even the courage of its own misanthropy.-Owen Gleiberman, EW (on the 1990 film adaptation)The writing of The Handmaids Tale is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwoods normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare.-Mary McCarthy, The New York TimesThis cri de coeur is certainly impassioned, and Atwoods adept style renders the grim atmosphere of the future quite palpably. But the didacticism of the novel wears thin; the book is simply too obvious to support its fictional context. Still, Atwood is quite an esteemed fiction writer, the author of such well-received novels as Surfacing (1973) and Life before Man (1980). Demand for her latest effort, therefore, is bound to be high; unfortunately, the number of disappointed readers may be equally high.-Brad Hooper, BooklistOffreds monotonous manner of expression just drones and drones.-Robert Linkous, San Francisco Review of Bookstype=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=58e65ba3e4b06a4cb31002e5,58c05330e4b0ed7182696155,58d916f1e4b03787d35a6294,58bf30a7e4b0d1078ca1f754,586bf7f1e4b0eb58648ac551,58eb8840e4b00de141050bef,58d034bee4b0ec9d29de74f5,58989258e4b0c1284f26ea2a,5871549fe4b02b5f85891a49,57bc9d60e4b00d9c3a1a67d0 -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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