Simpers along with irritating, prurient superficiality.
Three bleak, repetitious tales about young Japanese women entangled in sadistic sexual relationships with American men: previously untranslated 1980s work by prize-winning Japanese novelist Yamada (Trash, 1995, etc.).
The title story involves a love affair between Kim, a young exotic dancer, and Spoon, a black Navy deserter. Nicknamed for the spoon he fingers in his pocket, he deals drugs and eventually gets hauled away by the military for trying to sell confidential documents. Part of Spoon’s attraction to Kim is his strange otherness: his huge size, musky smell, greasy soul-food diet and disgusting manners. She enjoys being a “bad girl” and mixing pleasure with pain when they have rough sex, which must mean love. Yamada’s descriptions are comically hackneyed and devoid of irony, perhaps a function of the translation (e.g., “it was far more difficult to lick his wounds than to suck his cock”; “I cried and moaned as if I were at death’s door”). The next story, “The Piano Player’s Fingers,” follows a similar, intentionally provocative path as it describes an affair between big, black jazz piano player Leroy Jones and diminutive party girl Ruiko, who’s not as vulnerable as she looks. Leroy rapturously bats her around, disappears for two years, then returns in the company of various beautiful women, to Ruiko’s obsessive jealousy. For a short while, the two resume their dangerous coupling, but it ends badly. The language is silly (“Leroy’s fingers, playing my body, had captured my heart”), the characters undeveloped and stereotypical. “Jesse” deviates from the other stories, which were related by naïve-sounding protagonists with little sense of self-worth. A third-person narration shows Coco, the new girlfriend of a divorced American, trying to win the affection and respect of Rick’s 11-year-old son, Jesse, whose mother is also Japanese. Over a period of ten days, while Rick is absent on a trip, Coco endures the boy’s emotional manipulations and makes some intelligent deductions about love.
Simpers along with irritating, prurient superficiality.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35226-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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