An intimate, frustrating account of a man failing to deal with his failure.
Rapp (The Year of Endless Sorrows, 2006, etc.) brings dark humor and honesty to a story of death, divorce and disappearance.
We meet 30-something Francis Falbo at the onset of his agoraphobia. He hasn't left the house in nearly a month, has been wearing the same bathrobe for nine days and has developed a “real anxiety” that his beard might smell “gamey, like wet squirrel.” Francis writes the pages we read in the form of a personal manuscript not intended for an audience. Nonetheless, he's compelled to explain how he came to this sorry state. His mother, we learn, has died, his wife has left him for a slightly younger man with a “chiseled, perfect jaw line,” and his once-promising rock band, the Third Policeman, has not so much dissolved as spectacularly imploded in one of the novel’s more ridiculous scenes wherein the bassist comes out as gay and the drummer comes out as a “passionate homophobe, a terrible friend, and…a hairy emotional Nazi.” Rather than deal with his paralysis and personal crises, Francis immerses himself in his duties as a landlord and follows the lives of the eccentric tenants sharing his childhood home through one interminable Midwestern winter. At his most affecting, Francis is insightful and concise in his assessments of himself and others. When he sees his own reflection, he is relieved to look “mostly sad....Sad in the same way that weather can be sad.” Elsewhere, however, his dramatic shifts toward the absurd may thrust a reader emotionally off balance. Likewise, slapstick accounts of Francis’ many hang-ups—including the size and color of his penis—may stretch a reader’s patience and take away from the otherwise profound account of “all the things we must survive.”
An intimate, frustrating account of a man failing to deal with his failure.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-36891-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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