Word: atwoods
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...network run by archconservative Rupert Murdoch--is as obsessed with the inequities of capital as Eugene V. Debs was. At least half a dozen of its new shows have class themes. The first to premiere, and the season's first confirmed hit, is The O.C. Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) is a smart, poor kid taken in by the Cohen family of Newport Beach, Calif., after he gets in trouble with the law. Naturally, he finds beautiful girls, brutal rich boys and conniving adults. But The O.C. (on hiatus for baseball season; moves to Thursdays, 9 p.m. E.T., beginning...
...reviewer could give away everything in the pilot of The O.C. (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) and really give away nothing. He could say, for instance, that when disadvantaged teen Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) gets busted for car theft, kicked out of his house in Chino, Calif., and brought to ritzy Newport Beach by his public defender, Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), his weekend visit will become permanent. That when Ryan steps outside to sneak a smoke, he will run into the girl next door, his Troubled Future Love Interest. That the T.F.L.I. will have a Spoiled Rich Friend, a Mean...
This is not quite a popcorn novel, but it's not all you would hope from Atwood, who deftly imagined a different awful future in The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 book about a U.S. controlled by Fundamentalist Christians. Here she sticks closely to the rules of dystopian writing. Civilization has succumbed to a calamity, in this case brought on by heedless bioengineering, the kind that sets loose viruses that melt down their victims like "pink sorbet on a barbecue." Then again, the world was asking for it, what with the webcast suicides, the rampant porn and the chickens bred...
Even if the outlines of her story are familiar, what we look for from Atwood is intricate characterization, a fully imagined alternative universe and an original turn of mind. There's not much of that in the story told by Snowman, formerly Jimmy, a survivor of the global calamity who now lives in a tree, attended by the Children of Crake. This is a mild-mannered tribe of bioengineered humans, more or less, if you don't count the phosphorescent skin (amazing what you can do with jellyfish genes) and the simian sexual practices...
Literary fiction is all about nuance. Science fiction is an open invitation to moralizing. In a genre that lets you create your own world, who can resist the temptation merely to blow it all up while shaking a head at what fools these mortals be? Not Atwood. What's missing here is the emotional sinew of Cat's Eye, the complex mortifications of Alias Grace. In which case, pass the popcorn. --By Richard Lacayo