Successful as neobiblical allegory; as a novel, not so much.
At the dawn of the Trumpocalypse, a young couple embarks on a divine cross-country mission.
Eva and Murphy, who live in Miami and subsist on the gig economy, receive orders from Yahweh to hit the road and let America know who is Lord. Eva is chosen as the prophet just as she and Murphy are pondering whether to have a baby. After a stop at Eva’s ancestral fixer-upper, where her Uncle Orson imparts folksy wisdom and racing tips, they pick up a pet, “Fluffy 2,” who is either a cat, a dog, or a small goat, no one is sure which. A homeless woman inspires them with a brilliant scheme to develop “Mount Trashmore” resorts (since landfill mounds will, in much of the country, become shorefront property after sea levels rise). The postmodern picaresque continues as Eva evangelizes at lectures, billionaire retreats, and other venues representing the venality of American mores and the kitschiness of its culture. Her negotiated fee from Yahweh is $100 million to fund operation Mount Trashmore. The only hitch is that she and Murphy must also build a temple to the exact specifications of Solomon’s. As the couple and their ambiguous pet journey on, Thier avails himself of all opportunities to preach his own gospel of What Went Wrong through history, citing myriad not-so-fun facts such as that "there were strict gun control laws in the Wild West” and that one of the reasons Haiti is perennially impoverished is that after the island’s slaves freed themselves they owed reparations to their former slave owners that they never paid. As Eva proclaims the Lord, it is Murphy who launches jeremiads against the circumstances that made America not so great. “How can we accept that the world is the way it is?” is the novel’s overriding inquiry. Thier’s prodigious facility with language and penchant for stinging irony are evident. However, even metafiction has one basic requirement—to evoke pity and fear for the human predicament—and this is where the “narrow bridge” collapses.
Successful as neobiblical allegory; as a novel, not so much.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-141-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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