A slim novel that feels just perfect—each thought measured, each syllable counted, a kind of haiku to an independent woman.
In a remarkably confident debut, a woman’s life is revealed through fragments and meditations hinting at a life of great daring and unrealized dreams.
The book's 24 short, largely chronological chapters are titled like some kind of unorthodox primer—“On How to Study,” “On the Importance of Big Pockets,” “On One-Night Stands,” “On Looking the Part”—and indeed, Lillian holds forth, witty, crass and vulnerable, imparting the wisdom of a carefully reckless life. Despite being born to conventional Midwesterners in the 1930s, Lillian falls into a sophisticated life of love affairs and independence. After a couple of years at Vassar and polite Yale men, then a minor breakdown that sends her home to finish her English lit degree in Missouri, Lillian finds a temporary job typing a manuscript for a journalist in Germany. In Munich, she's shellshocked by isolation and innocence, wandering around with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov to keep her dining-for-one respectable. An ardent Hungarian named Lazlo forces himself on her, though “[s]uch things weren’t called rape back then.” Lillian finds permanent work at a newswire service, and her career takes her to Paris in the '50s (and to the bed of Willis, a man of great taste and rash decisions), to London in the early '60s (and a house with John, an icy columnist), and to New York in the '70s (with Ted, her married boss, filling her every thought). Although she wanted marriage and children, a number of very bad and very good choices kept her single, though rarely alone. Unconventionally plotted, Lillian’s tale is filled with lush details and cool observations about the twins of female freedom: contentment and compromise.
A slim novel that feels just perfect—each thought measured, each syllable counted, a kind of haiku to an independent woman.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16889-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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