Tyler’s appealing warmth and flair for eccentric comedy are abundantly displayed in her superb 14th novel, following close on the heels of such recent successes as Breathing Lessons (1988) and Saint Maybe (1991). The story’s narrator and main character (and, arguably, hero) is Barnaby Gaitlin, an underachieving Baltimorean approaching 30 who’s divorced, stuck in a no-future job (which he loves) with Rent-a-Back, performing miscellaneous chores for elderly and disabled people, and indebted, financially and otherwise, to his upscale parents (who manage a charitable foundation) for his well- remembered juvenile delinquency. A beautifully plotted and skillfully exfoliating narrative traces Barnaby’s gradual shedding of his youthful indifference and irresponsibility, and immersion in a nest of relationships that stimulate his growth into the “good boy” his clients believe him to be. There isn’t a saccharine moment in this affecting story, which begins as Barnaby, en route to visit his young daughter in Philadelphia, contrives to meet a pleasant woman traveler who unself-consciously agrees to perform a favor for a distraught stranger. The puzzle of Sophia Barnes’s instinctive goodness draws Barnaby to her and, paradoxically, toward another “housebreaking” that is the making of him as it’s also an ironic echo of the novel’s opening action. Prominent among the unlikely reality instructors who simultaneously smooth and ruffle Barnaby’s amusingly described passage toward maturity are his patient father and disapproving mother (who, it seems, cannot forgive her son for outgrowing his waywardness), and especially his several aged employers, all knowing they’re headed toward death, yet uniformly determined to hold onto whatever world is left them (for example, Mrs. Alford, who dies only after completing her “quilt of our planet”—“makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment”). Absolutely wonderful: Tyler’s many admirers are sure to number this among her very best work.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40256-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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