Reasonably evocative of the self-indulgent ’80s, with some diverting magazine and party scenes, but they’d have to be a lot...
From Witchel (Girls Only, 1997), famed and feared for her acerbic profiles in the New York Times, a surprisingly bland first novel about life on the media fast track in Manhattan.
Sure, there are some good lines about Jolie, the slick women’s magazine where Sandra Berlin holds down a just-above-entry-level job in 1988. “Apparently, pictures of models jumping in the air wearing five-dollar T-shirts and three-thousand-dollar organza skirts were just what the world had been waiting for,” Sandra wisecracks, and her descriptions of Jolie’s editors and her fellow grunts are equally amusing. But they’re also generic, as is almost everything else here, from Sandra’s Jewish suburban background to her WASP fiancé Bucky, who turns out to be simultaneously engaged to two other women, to the inevitable gay friend who confesses halfway through the book that he’s dying of AIDS (a heavily foreshadowed development). Witchel’s description of people’s attitude toward the disease seems awfully naive for the sophisticated circles her heroine moves in. Similarly, although Sandra repeatedly describes herself as smart, she seldom acts that way. Would even the most self-centered workaholic have been taken in by Bucky all these years? Would even the most insecure single girl (Sandra’s 26 but talks as though she’s pushing 40) ever contemplate taking him back? And what except contrived plot complications keeps her apart from Mr. Perfect, art writer Mark Lewis? Yes, we get it: Sandra is intellectually gifted, but dumb about the Things That Really Matter. Witchel has acquired husband Frank Rich’s habit of announcing the blindingly obvious as though she were the first to think of it. “Love, real love, contagious and messy, vanquished all [the rules],” Sandra intones; later, she tells Bucky, “I realized that after the years we spent together I never really knew you.” Duh.
Reasonably evocative of the self-indulgent ’80s, with some diverting magazine and party scenes, but they’d have to be a lot sharper to make up for a tired plot and a heroine who’s not nearly as endearing as her creator thinks.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41179-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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