Bemusing SF-tinged fare echoing the tone and spirit of Saunders and Vonnegut.
Cozy domestic lives are routinely unsettled, sometimes violently, in this dystopian set of stories by seasoned experimenter Monson (How We Speak to One Another, 2017, etc.).
The “gnome” of this book’s title is a garden gnome, which intermittently appears here as a symbol of the intersection of weirdness and allegedly “normal” suburbia. In “Believing in the Future With the Torturer’s Apprentice,” a female narrator recalls her husband’s secret life producing torture porn. In “The Reassurances,” a man begins working at the cryogenic facility that’s preserving his girlfriend, who was killed in a car wreck. The glib narrator of “It Is Hard Not To Love the Starvationist’s Assistant” works at an extreme weight-loss facility where amputation is mandatory if goals aren’t met. And in the concluding “Our Song,” a man working on tools to archive and tweak our memories roams around the troubled psyche of a popular singer, attempting to seed her mind with a song idea. Some of the stories’ conceits are high-concept to a fault; one, for instance, takes on the format of a patent document. But the virtue of the best stories is Monson’s capacity to bridge unusual setups with compassionate storytelling. “The Reassurances,” in particular, blends its science-fiction milieu with the narrator’s repeated reckoning with loss, and Monson delivers that feeling with both heart and humor. (The narrator sponsored a stretch of highway in his late girlfriend's name before she died, and he’s now legally bound to tidy it.) Sometimes the mood is openly comic: In “Everyone Looks Better When They’re Under Arrest,” the narrator bemoans a never-arriving stove that would complete his family’s obligation to a reality show: “We are on the pointy end of some long existential stick.” But the atmosphere is generally more muted as Monson contemplates how suffused with loss, fear, and mortality our everyday lives are.
Bemusing SF-tinged fare echoing the tone and spirit of Saunders and Vonnegut.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64445-012-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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