Constitution, which a majority of states then vote to ratify.Ībortion, or the sudden illegality of it, is the novel’s grounding hypothesis, but it isn’t its primary focus. In Red Clocks, women simply wake up one day to find that a president they didn’t vote for-a man with a history of extreme rhetoric and legislation on reproductive issues-has proposed a Personhood Amendment to the U.S. The difference is that The Handmaid’s Tale has to imagine a confluence of global pandemics, mass infertility, and constitutional crises to will Gilead into existence. Zumas, like Atwood, has grounded her book in reality-in things that existing people have said and done. But the speculative aspects of the book, combined with Zumas’s historical and sociological insights, inevitably bring to mind Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Like an Elizabeth Strout novel, their personal stories and heartbreak layers into something more acute. Zumas switches fluently through the perspectives of each of these women in Red Clocks, which is set in the fictional small town of Newville, Oregon. The only tweak Zumas has made is that in the world of her book abortion has been criminalized in the U.S., an occurrence introduced so quietly and so plausibly that it isn’t even startling-just another calamity for women to add to the list. Mattie, a teenager, loses her virginity to a confident and callous classmate who’s unconcerned with her comfort and doesn’t wear protection. Gin, a loner, is defiantly private but offers home remedies to local women with health issues but no money or insurance. Susan, a mother, raises two children in the house she grew up in. Ro, a history teacher, has a father in a retirement home in Florida and a brother who died of a heroin overdose.

The America in Leni Zumas’s new novel, Red Clocks, is so familiar as to be almost unremarkable.

Red clocks leni zumas