Witty, wicked and occasionally too clever. If Simone writes songs half as well as she writes fiction, expect her to become a...
Unemployed woman meets man on the Internet in this forceful, scabrous satire-cum–morality tale.
This is a remarkably assured debut from Simone, a singer and the author of a collection of essays (You Must Go and Win, 2011). When we learn on the first page that Anna Krestler has been collecting spam, and on the second that she has been let go from a midtown law firm named Pinter, Chinski and Harms, the satiric fix is in. Anna lives in a world where, “It hardly seemed possible that a person who didn’t exist on the Internet could exist at all.” That this might be our world is terrifying. Adrift in Brooklyn, Anna rooms with Brie, a perpetual intern who Googles herself the morning after parties to see what kind of time she had. Anna’s dear friend Leslie, married, with a young daughter and struggling to have a second child, has found the straight and narrow high road, traveling from business school to a job at the consulting firm McKinsey, with stops for yoga and Third Wave Coffee. Leslie volunteers as Anna’s life coach, but Anna needs more help than Leslie can provide. When Anna responds to a Craigslist ad for a film intern, she meets the charismatic but evasive Taj, an experimental filmmaker. Taken with him, her new opportunity and her new self, she plunges into a life that even her mother can surmise is not what it seems. This is the punch line of every joke about the Internet, and Simone puts sting in that punch. The title is the weakest part of the book: It doesn’t do justice to the wickedness, the folly and the abject narcissism of the main character, and character is fate.
Witty, wicked and occasionally too clever. If Simone writes songs half as well as she writes fiction, expect her to become a household name.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-865-47899-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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