Fact-based fiction needs more imaginative transformation than it gets here.
Performance artist Kleine debuts with the bleak intertwined tales of a fourth-grader murdered by her mother and a narcissistic loser who shoots the movie star he’s been stalking.
The novel was “inspired,” the author tells us, by the creepy real-life love affair of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and Leslie DeVeau, who killed her daughter (a childhood friend of Kleine’s) and met Hinckley while both were patients in a psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately, the only character who comes to fictional life here is Tammy, an anxious 10-year-old at the end of 1980, when she relocates to Washington, D.C., and finds herself on the fringes of her new school’s social scene while younger sister Steffi fits right in and swiftly acquires a best friend, Kirin. Tammy’s mother and stepfather are stick figures of selfishness, leaving the girls to pick up and supervise their 4-year-old half brother after school, while Kirin’s mother, Valerie, is such a twitching mass of symptoms that it’s all too clear which mom will be shotgunning her daughter halfway through the novel. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hackney (the Hinckley stand-in) grieves over John Lennon’s death and can’t understand why neither his parents nor anyone at the college where he’s stopped attending classes can see how special he is—never mind that he makes few efforts to demonstrate his specialness other than some creative bouts of lying to cover up his failures. The flat-affect prose doesn’t encourage us to feel any empathy for—let alone interest in—Jeffrey or anyone else except pathetic Tammy in this dour saga of alienation and unhappiness. It doesn’t help that the narrative whipsaws between Jeff’s growing fixation on starlet Amber Carrol and the interactions of the kids and parents in Tammy’s neighborhood, chronicled in chapters confusingly split among multiple points of view. After the two murderous denouements, the novel dwindles into a depressive anticlimax for Tammy and more delusions for Jeff and Valerie.
Fact-based fiction needs more imaginative transformation than it gets here.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-619-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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