A winning depiction of a modern spiritual quest, even if Grace’s speedy transformation to in-demand guru is a bit too smooth.
In the second novel from London-resident Gray (Ten Men, 2005), a successful British pharmaceutical rep gives up her lucrative career to train as a yoga instructor.
For elegant 40-year-old Grace (the daughter of two physicians) the healthcare profession was an obvious choice, whether or not it particularly suited her. As a legal “drug dealer” shilling antidepressants to doctors, she takes refuge from her hectic city life in the yoga studio, under the ministrations of quirky “Swami P,” who shows her that there really is more to the world than material possessions and quick-fix happy pills. Yoga, which also led her to her handsome unemployed actor boyfriend Harry, inspires Grace to quit her job and pursue a simpler life teaching yoga to others. To that end she signs up for a teacher training course in Southern California, right before dumping the leechy Harry, who was probably cheating on her anyway. Then it’s off to groovy Malibu where she bonds with an assortment of fellow devotees. She also carries on a sweetly intimate correspondence with Dr. James, an attractive (single) psychiatrist back in England who, like Grace, has begun to have doubts about Western medicine and the path his life has taken. Their romantic potential is thwarted, though, when he jets off to Vietnam to study alternative medicine just as she is returning to London. Back at home she quickly picks up a variety of clients ranging from pampered rich women to hard case National Health patients referred to her by a frustrated doctor. These reluctant yogis, who suffer from a variety of mental and physical ailments, challenge Grace’s confidence, as does aging supermodel Collette, who hopes that yoga will help her to conceive. It soon becomes clear to all her students that Grace is a natural—so good that an A-list movie star tries to lure her to New York. But what about Dr. James? Liberally peppered with yogic terms and philosophy, Gray’s drolly funny novel favors Grace’s internal transformation over dramatic plot.
A winning depiction of a modern spiritual quest, even if Grace’s speedy transformation to in-demand guru is a bit too smooth.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-986-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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