It rambles, and it’s a downer. But there’s a real kick to it.
Good writing essentially redeems a potentially self-defeating subject in the Scottish author’s absorbing fourth: a first-person chronicle of alcoholism that’s equal parts despairing, funny, and intermittently tiresome.
Protagonist Hannah Luckraft (whose surname vibrates with suggestions of repeated false hopes amid serial wreckage) is a 30ish underachiever who still lives with her frustrated but indulgent parents, loses successive jobs (pointedly, that of sales rep for a cardboard-manufacturing company), has unsatisfying sex with nondescript dominant males, and drinks—Lord, how she drinks. The 14 chapters here doubtless connote the Stations of the Cross (one character refers to them rather obtrusively), but it’s hard to decide whether Hannah is one of those Dostoevsky called the “insulted and injured,” or a detached sardonic observer of her own ruinous flaws (“I am enough to make one miserable. I am too much to bear”). In any case, she keeps right on her way to hell, tormenting her long-suffering mum (a nice crisp characterization) and self-righteous younger brother, and making a mess of a chance for possible happiness with her fellow souse and sometime lover, dentist Robert Gardener. Paradise (the blissful state Hannah seeks in alcohol) is sometimes gloomy and redundant (there are echoes of Jean Rhys and Malcolm Lowry, and a hint of her countryman Alasdair Gray’s far livelier 1982, Janine), more often buoyed by Kennedy’s flinty descriptive skills and bracing black humor. Fortunately, the general malaise is broken up by such beguiling set pieces as Hannah’s residence at a Dickensian rehab clinic and a climactic train journey whose grotesque details suggest a fusion of Hieronymus Bosch and Irvine Welsh. Kennedy (Indelible Acts, 2003, etc.) is a risk-taker, and her fiction often succeeds in inverse proportion to its formal smoothness and symmetry.
It rambles, and it’s a downer. But there’s a real kick to it.Pub Date: March 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4364-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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