Exquisite.
Stories and a novella suggest that Rifkin is what might have happened had Nathanael West lived on and been even more talented.
“Encino could be a sunny place to have fun, resembling countryside France burnished at sunset, or maybe the Midwest, the smalltown parts where kids trade baseball cards and mailmen sleep in their trucks.” Rifkin’s centerpiece is the title novella. Richard Leviton has managed to eke out a life in LA, doing a little writing, a little acting, marrying three times, and having a child, but like everyone else he’s lonely. An early-life fling with the eccentric Jaime Gorski seems innocent enough—he ignores the letters she writes him. But years later, when he follows a mysterious impulse to buy an SUV, there’s Gorski again. Leviton is reintroduced to her life, and soon enough to her confused son. Complications abound: the son, Peter, rips off the SUV and disappears, Leviton winds up having a close encounter with the kid’s girlfriend, Peter ends up working at a strip club to find himself, Jaime worries as she enters old age. But what’s notable here is the vast and random portrait of LA that emerges, seemingly picking up from where West left off in tragedy and carrying it through the subsequent meanderings of modernity. Every bit as pleasing as the plot is Rifkin’s language, full of wit, truth, and spot-on nonsequiturs. No less pleasing are the meditative shorter pieces, like “The Idols of Sickness,” a stream-of-consciousness treatment of defect starting with strung testicles and ending with an inherited modeling agency, and “After the Divorce,” a boy’s journey to see an estranged father among the star homes, a meeting bound to lead to disappointment, though someone says, “Even today, I can hold out as long as the sun is up for the story to have been about hope.”
Exquisite.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-87286-424-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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