Davis's skill brings wintry Montana alive—predictably bleak, unexpectedly vibrant—and if her characters inch over the top at...
Nothing—not the people, not the land, not the winter—is merely life-size in this brilliant, and beautifully written, debut novel from storywriter and Pushcart-winner Davis.
After four years of better-than-average sheriffing, Ike Parsons is still regarded as a stranger in the tough little Montana town that employs him. Sure, he can name all the people who regularly hang out at Steve’s Barber Shop, but that doesn’t mean he understands them. You have to be range-bred, he’s been told often enough, to grasp fully how Montanans feel about their land, their cattle and horses, their customs, their neighbors. Wisconsin farm-bred Ike agrees, but the fact is there’s no other place for him but among these hard-bitten, often quirky people because Pattiann, his wife, is rooted there. They met, almost by accident, at college. They fell in love-more deeply than Ike would have believed possible. And when she left to come home, Ike followed: no other choice. Now, however, there’s the matter of Chas Stubblefield confronting him, and the horrifying drama unfolding on the frost-bound Stubblefield ranch. Day after day, cattle have been dying, starved, because Chas is broke and can’t buy feed for them. It’s reached the point where the herd is beyond saving, where the only remaining question is how to end lives mercifully. Self-centered Chas, blaming everything but his own inept performance as a manager, remains sullen and uncooperative. Everyone in town recognizes how awful the situation is. Everyone knows something should be done, but no one’s going to thank Ike, the outlander, for doing it. Including Pattiann, whose feelings for Chas are complex—part compassion, part nostalgia. And there may be another part, too, Ike can’t help thinking, which is what both scares and infuriates him.
Davis's skill brings wintry Montana alive—predictably bleak, unexpectedly vibrant—and if her characters inch over the top at times, most readers won’t mind unduly.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26140-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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