A constricted tale of unresolved mourning only partly redeemed by the clever twist Raphael (Burning Down the House, 2001,...
A fictional take on Raphael’s chronicles of the lives of Holocaust survivors’ children.
It seems almost as if Paul Menzus was born on the occasion of his mother’s death. Returning to New York a few days after her funeral to meet with his siblings—beautiful, bitchy Dina, whose wealthy Quebecois husband got her to leave her job as a book editor, and screwed-up, bisexual Simon, who drives a cab in Queens—he says nothing of anyone or anything not intimately connected to his mother's demise, except to sing the praises of rural Michigan and to regret the loss of Valerie Hoffman, the girlfriend he abandoned to move there. His narrative, as airless as his parents’ closed-up apartment on West End Avenue, focuses so exclusively on his memories of his mother, a bleak, carping Holocaust survivor, that it seems a miracle when Valerie appears, still unmarried, and accepts his dinner invitation. Even at dinner, Paul obsesses: Why wouldn’t his mother speak of her experiences during the war? Why did a healthy woman die suddenly of a heart attack? And why did she leave him her reparations—the tainted “German money” Dina wants him to share, money that threatens to rip apart his remaining family?
A constricted tale of unresolved mourning only partly redeemed by the clever twist Raphael (Burning Down the House, 2001, etc.) saves for the end.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9679520-0-X
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
PROFILES
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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