In pristine, elegant prose, Miller creates an indelible portrait of a mysterious woman and her tragic quest.
The fantastic voyage of a haunted woman.
In the opening scene of Miller’s (Pure, 2012, etc.) graceful, absorbing novel, Maud Stamp and Tim Rathbone, members of their university’s sailing club, are at work repairing a boat when suddenly Maud falls 20 feet onto “rubbled brick” and, although at first she appears dead, opens her eyes, gets up, and walks 15 steps before collapsing. Tim—“tall, blue-eyed, patrician”—shocked that she is alive, rushes her to a hospital and, in short order, becomes her lover. He's fascinated by this self-possessed woman who lives in Spartan rooms, who “does not do banter,” who (like Miller’s protagonist in 1997's Ingenious Pain) seems not to suffer, or even to feel, pain, and who has on her forearm a tattoo, Sauve Qui Peut: every man for himself. The lovers seem complete opposites: after earning a degree in biology, Maud takes a position at a pharmaceutical company, assigned, ironically, to oversee trials of a powerful painkiller. Tim, born into wealth and privilege—Miller delightedly skewers his family’s pretensions and hypocrisies—occupies himself by playing one of his precious collectible guitars; after their daughter is born, he happily becomes a stay-at-home dad. But Tim feels increasingly frustrated with Maud’s coldness, her apparent distance from him and their child. Who is this woman, he wonders, who “entered his life with the force of myth”? Maud is, indeed, a cipher: is she a stereotypical scientist, focused on chemical rather than human interactions? Does she have Asperger’s? Or is she hiding some deep, unspeakable grief, a more likely possibility that emerges in the second half of the novel, when she flees from a devastating tragedy to sail across the Atlantic, alone. In palpable detail, Miller depicts Maud’s immersion in a watery, ravaging world, at once alien and threatening. There is something Shakespearean in her journey: in her battle against nature’s wrath; the dreamlike settlement, inhabited by children, where she washes ashore; and her overwhelming desire to confront the unbearable.
In pristine, elegant prose, Miller creates an indelible portrait of a mysterious woman and her tragic quest.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-347-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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