Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax-creepily profound and most provocative.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Proven at last productive, she’s bound to be rewarded by the State….isn’t she? In her first novel, short-story writer Holmqvist echoes political-science treatises like Hobbes’ Leviathan and Rousseau’s The Social Contract (gone decidedly mad here), as well as the usual dystopian novels from Brave New World to 1984. Dazzled by upcoming motherhood, Dorrit is certain her bulging belly will gain her freedom. As her roommates are ushered off one by one to their final donations, she panics into the arms of Johannes, a fellow Unit resident who actually manages to impregnate her. It’s a benign investigation into the effects of exercise, but in the cafeteria and on the lush grounds Dorrit soon notices other campers sleepwalking like zombies or displaying weirdly blotched skin. And she takes pride in being needed when she’s enlisted in one of the Unit’s many medical experiments. She feels a sense of community, a closeness never offered by Nils, the inadequate lover who would never leave his wife. Dorrit Weger, freelance writer, dog-lover and free sprit, is initially mesmerized by her new surroundings. Big Brother doesn’t take every oldster, just those termed “dispensables”: the cash-strapped, underachieving or, worst of all, childless. They’re fattened like calves, but there’s civic-duty payback: mandatory organ donation, culminating in the final “gift” of their lungs and hearts. This is the Second Reserve Bank Unit, into which the State herds women 50 and up, and men 60 and over, to use for biological material. The shelf-life for inhabitants of this paradise is about six years.
But Swedish ace Holmqvist’s English-language debut soon discloses a catch.
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