A valiant effort, though the forced rapprochement with troublesome characters Louise and Michael don’t sit well.
Journalist Fleming’s second foray into fiction, after the charming novella Marriage (2003), delivers a 40ish New Yorker from a dead-end affair with an older man into a reconciliation with her estranged sister.
Fleming deeply wants to please her readers, and renders her journalist protagonist Clare Layton sympathetic despite her self-protective rough edges. Originally from California (the daughter of a famous 1960s TV actress), Clare has resolved to make New York her home, and dig into her unsatisfying but self-sustaining six-year affair with married, 60ish mayoral assistant Michael, who has just had prostate surgery and is not up to having sex. When Louise, the older sister she hasn’t seen for 27 years, calls her in the middle of the night wanting to see her, Clare, now indulging in Ambien and Chinese takeout, agrees to a meeting. What follows is the heavy-handed middle section of this curiously disjointed work: knotty Clare and Louise, a suburban Florida wife with two sons, reconcile briefly over ladylike sprees to hair salons. Louise, bizarrely, leads her sister to believe she is fleeing her abusive husband, though in fact the couple is using the ruse to try to ensnare Clare into writing about their sick teenaged son, Luke, who desperately needs a new liver. Clare’s realization that she’s been tricked leads to her angry expulsion of the couple, and the finite nature of her affair with Michael—unreachable in most ways and not a lovable character, by any means—begins to dawn on her. Clare undergoes a mysterious transformation that leads her to Florida, and to Luke, who turns out to be a sensitive aspiring evangelical preacher. Clare offers nobly to donate her own liver, and the breach that began with the desertion of the sisters’ movie-star mom heals. Fleming’s work flies a half-dozen different ways, especially in flashbacks to growing up in Hollywood.
A valiant effort, though the forced rapprochement with troublesome characters Louise and Michael don’t sit well.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-0105-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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