LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2019F7
BOOK REVIEW
except for the Aunts.”
Agnes realizes that her life has
been full of lies, that she might lose
faith. “If you’ve never had a faith,
you will not understand what that
means .... You feel exiled, as if you
are lost in a dark wood.” This is her
testimony, recorded years later for
posterity.
Readers of “The Handmaid’s
Tale” will recognize the Aunts, the
women who trained Handmaids as
vessels for sex, beating girls on feet
and hands because those body
parts were not necessary for their
task: to bear children to men whose
wives cannot.
Atwood’s new novel is all about
narrative, the written and record-
ed testimonies of three women:
Aunt Lydia, a terrifying and puni-
tive woman, writes her foundation
story now, with hoarded ink, pages
hidden in a Catholic historical
tome. Agnes, at 14, is betrothed
to an even more powerful Com-
mander. Daisy, a teenager raised
in Canada whose parents are killed
by Gilead terrorists, comes to
learn her own connections to the
poisonous regime in the United
States.
Their testaments begin 15 years
after the beginning of civil war.
The Commanders, with their
blue-robed Wives, red-robed
Handmaids, and green-robed
Martha housekeepers, retain
power in Cambridge, Mass., heart
of Gilead. The most-prized hu-
mans are children, and yet what
happens to daughters is no gift.
Illicit sex, of course, in this re-
public founded on sexual control,
leads to the complicated, fascinat-
ing plot of “The Testaments,” just
as illegal sex and forbidden Scrab-
ble led to the downfall of another
Commander in “The Handmaid’s
Tale.”
Offred, narrator of the first nov-
el, attempted escape into the
woods toward Canada, her hus-
band presumed shot dead by
Guardians, her young daughter
torn from her arms. Offred’s lyrical,
precise voice gave readers the
shocking limits of her existence, in
a small bedroom, on sidewalks
where she saw humans hanged
from the Wall, bloody mouths
pressing through white hoods, and
inside those walls, the Eyes and the
Aunts, like Lydia, ruled over the re-
public.
In the new novel, we learn that
Lydia’s life as a family court judge
ended in a single day. Hundreds of
professional women — doctors,
lawyers, business owners, profes-
sors — are herded at gunpoint into
the Harvard football stadium,
many killed by firing squad, others
recruited to shoot.
“The opposition is led by the ed-
ucated, so the educated are the
first to be eliminated,” Lydia re-
counts. “But none of my college-ac-
quired polish was of any use to me
here. I needed to revert to the mul-
ish underclass child, the deter-
mined drudge, the brainy overa-
chiever .... I needed to work the an-
gles, once I could find out what the
angles were.”
Chosen by Commander Judd,
Aunt Lydia is tortured first, and
then placed into position as the
founder of the framework of life for
women here. She secures power by
insisting that only women will con-
trol other women; men are not even
allowed into Ardua Hall, where
only Aunts and Supplicants reside.
From Ardua, she rules what she
can and plots retribution with infi-
nite patience, waiting for the right
girls.
The right girls are Agnes Je-
mima and her best friend, Becka,
who are to be child brides. Both
have been traumatized by a sexual
predator, a man whose profession
allows him unlimited access to
young girls. (The parallels to pre-
sent-day stories we women are fi-
nally telling are strong.)
Recruited by Aunt Lydia, theybecome Supplicants, finally taught
to read and write. After Agnes
opens that Bible, the truths multi-
ply. Her dead mother was not her
mother; her hateful stepmother re-
veals that her birth was to a treach-
erous Handmaid. Agnes is be-
trothed to Commander Judd, an
original Son of Jacob who began
Gilead. In his 60s, clearly sterile, he
has poisoned three Wives already,
had five Handmaids, and desires
only child brides.
The “fairy tale” is what I
thought of: Bluebeard, Sleeping
Beauty, yes, but also men today
who call wives “Mother” rather
than their “Christian names,” men
who refuse to be alone with report-
ers or other professional women,
men who have been married three
times and yet court evangelical
support.
We see Particicutions, which
Aunt Lydia began, wherein men
are killed violently by hand, by
Handmaids. Endless suicides,
women who drown themselves in
cisterns, hang themselves by door-
knobs: Atwood, perhaps in
homage to a Puritan ancestor who
was hanged for a witch, pays par-
ticular attention to the primitive
nature of hanging.Daisy is the secret child, trans-
ported from Canada to Gilead, as
in a fairy tale wherein a baby must
be hidden. These woods are dark,
with clues for readers of the first
novel in the trees. Agnes Jemima
remembers forests, and running,
and a woman’s arms. Daisy, asked
whether she knows Gilead, says, “I
watch the news. We took it in
school,” but she’s trained in safe
houses set up by Mayday, the reb-
els.
Atwood’s braided storyline
leads to the best parts of the novel,
the conversations between girls
and women. The Aunts are named
for remembered beauty mavens —
Estee, Helena, Elizabeth and even
Vidala. (Think hair, for the last
one.) The wedding arranger Aunts
are Sara, Lorna and Betty.
But cloistered lives encourage
betrayal. Writing these stories in
her private sanctum, alongside her
forbidden favorite novels (“Jane
Eyre,” “Anna Karenina,” “Lives of
Girls and Women”), Lydia plans
the downfall of the republic.
I confess: I didn’t read the first
novel in the 1980s; as a young mar-
ried woman surrounded by babies
and family, the first chapter was
too frightening. I read “The Hand-
maid’s Tale” last month. Having
three college-educated daughters
with brown skin and curly hair, I
was chilled.
But in both novels, brief men-
tions of Children of Ham being tak-
en from Detroit to Homelands inNorth Dakota, of Mormon rebel-
lions in Utah and the independent
Republic of Texas, among other
scattered asides, didn’t seem re-
flective of the U.S. as a nation
where nearly half the population is
descended from indigenous, immi-
grant and formerly enslaved peo-
ple of color; where people speak
Spanish, Yoruba, Tagalog and
Mandarin.
Lydia, as a former family court
judge, might have given readers a
bigger sense of how Gilead’s found-
ers sought a return to whiteness,
especially when some current poli-
ticians explicitly cite a need for
“American babies.” In 1986, some
reviewers dismissed Atwood’s dys-
topian vision; in her acknowledg-
ments, Atwood says “The Testa-
ments” addresses questions posed
by millions of readers: “Thirty-five
years is a long time to think about
possible answers, and the answers
have changed as society itself has
changed, and as possibilities have
become actualities.”
Fierce battles over abortion
rights, Planned Parenthood and
women’s bodies are juxtaposed
with a recent Kardashian family
birthday party, Handmaid-
themed.
Everyone should read “The Tes-
taments” and consider the true de-
sires of human nature.Straight’s memoir, “In the
Country of Women,” was
published in August.Atwood’s powerful ‘Testaments’
[Atwood,from F1]
MARGARET ATWOOD’Slong-awaited sequel, “The Testaments,” picks up the narrative of “The Handmaid’s Tale” 15 years later.Liam SharpNan A. TaleseThe Testaments
Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese: 432 pages, $28.95Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about
the People We Don’t Know
Malcolm Gladwell
Little Brown and Company: 387 pages,
$30.
What does Malcolm Gladwell
sound like when he’s angry?
That sounds like the setup for a
joke when considering the bestsell-
ing author, New Yorker writer and
podcast host, whose name has be-
come synonymous for rational, at
times contrarian, examinations of
conventional wisdom. But it also
feels like a fitting, even Gladwellian
rhetorical question in approaching
“Talking to Strangers: What We
Should Know About People We
Don’t Know,” his sixth book exam-
ining human behavior.
Because, as he says in the book,
Gladwell found himself feeling “an-
grier and angrier” when consider-
ing the 2015 death of Sandra Bland.
The young black woman hanged
herself in a jail cell days after being
taken into custody for a minor traf-
fic violation in rural Texas. The cir-
cumstances of her arrest and its in-
vestigation stuck with Gladwell,
who was raised in Canada and is
half-Jamaican.
That tragic incident forms a
framework for his most topical
book yet. “Talking to Strangers”
looks at the ways we do harm by
failing to understand one another,
a problem he investigates through
the child-abuse scandal involving
Penn State assistant football
coach Jerry Sandusky, the trial of
Amanda Knox, the suicide of
Sylvia Plath, the deceptions of fin-
ancier Bernie Madoff and the TV
sitcom “Friends.”
Some people punch a wall.
Gladwell examines pop culture to
deconstruct human behavior.
To be fair, this sort of thing has
worked out well for Gladwell, so
much so that he’s synonymous
with meticulous yet reliably engag-
ing distillation of scientific studies
into TED Talk-friendly conversa-
tion starters that play well at din-
ner parties. Gladwell has been
criticized over the years for cherry-
picking research to support his
contrarian ideas, but to his credit
he regularly claims to be merely a
gateway to more academic
sources, what he has called “the
hard stuff.”
At a time when the world feels
intractably polarized, a book ex-
amining the varying ways we mis-
interpret or fail to communicate
with one another could not feel
more necessary.
After setting the stage with the
circumstances of Bland’s death,
which came amid a rash of deaths
of unarmed African Americans in
encounters with the police, Glad-
well moves on to the human blind
spots at the root of familiar trage-dies and failures from history.
One of those blind spots, Glad-
well contends, is that human be-
ings default to taking strangers at
their word, an impulse he cites in
the case of Ana Montes, the so-
called queen of Cuba who was con-
sidered one of the CIA’s brightest
stars before being discovered as a
double agent. This “default to
truth” also was a factor in the case
of Larry Nasser, the doctor con-
victed of sexually abusing young
athletes on the U.S. Women’s Gym-
nastics team.
Gladwell also devotes a chapter
to Sandusky, the coach whose 2011
child molestation conviction led to
charges against administratorswho failed to investigate his behav-
ior for nearly 10 years after a suspi-
cious incident was reported. Glad-
well goes on to build his case
around other communication
breakdowns, including strangers’
actions not conforming to ac-
cepted norms (“transparency”)
and a failure to recognize a connec-
tion between behavior and exter-
nal factors (“coupling”).
With a mix of reporting, re-
search and a deft narrative hand,
Gladwell illuminates these exam-
ples with page-turning urgency of a
paperback thriller, building a case
on the ways these misconceptions
lead to disaster. Some of Gladwell’s
diversions into pop culture pay off
more than others.
Hiring a psychologist to map
the facial expressions throughout
a scene from “Friends” is a long way
around to introduce the idea peo-
ple don’t always look like their feel-
ings (and — surprise! — life doesn’t
resemble a sitcom). And in exam-
ining the Brock Turner rape case
at Stanford, Gladwell’s examina-
tion of alcohol abuse among uni-
versity students drifts uncomfort-
ably close to victim-blaming before
hailing the outcome, which he said
delivered a “measure of justice.”
But for a book implicitly struc-
tured around race and law enforce-
ment, the omission of Turner’s
controversial six-month sentence
feels puzzling and an example of
how Gladwell’s sharp eye can over-
look a bigger picture.Similarly, Gladwell lauds efforts
to apply location and context to po-
licing strategies by Kansas City law
enforcement, which used geo-
graphic analysis of high-crime
areas to increase enforcement of
traffic violations across a few select
city blocks. It’s a key component of
Gladwell’s run-up to Bland’s case,
and he artfully illustrates the way a
targeted, research-based tactic
was subsequently misused around
the country, including where Bland
was traveling in Waller County,
Texas.
Yet for all the ironclad rheto-
rical evidence outlined in Glad-
well’s dramatic buildup, there’s a
nagging sense he’s left another,
very human phenomenon under-
explored. Strangers misunder-
stand one another by nature on
multiple behavioral fronts, includ-
ing when it comes to race, which re-
ceives only a glancing treatment
here.
Maybe Gladwell felt the topic
has been sufficiently explored else-
where or was perhaps too obvious a
contributing factor to break down
further here for its role in the Bland
case and others like it, what he calls
“a strange interlude in American
public life.”
Gladwell has again delivered a
compelling, conversation-starting
read, but there’s no question more
of the hard stuff remains ahead.Barton is a former Times staff
writer now based in Portland, Ore.Gladwell offers a ‘stranger danger’ alert
By Chris Barton
MALCOLM GLADWELLon
“Talking With Strangers.”Celeste Sloman