Excellent meditations on the human condition, well-suited to rest alongside the likes of Denis Johnson and Richard Ford.
Seven short stories, a rough-and-tumble novella and a clever bit of metafiction on teaching punctuate this collection from Wilder.
It’s very lean, this striking collection of tales that remind one less of contemporaries like Monica Drake or Sam Lipsyte and more of the darker plays of Sam Shepard. Loosely based around the western setting that surrounds California-based writer Wilder, the stories often pivot on the upending of clichés but also focus equally on the difficult equilibrium of relationships between all sorts of people. The title story observes the inner lives of people in an odd traffic class who have become obsessed with the mechanics of driving. “All she had to do was actually hit someone,” Wilder writes. “Not hit to kill. She only needed to make contact, feel the impact. Once she knew what it felt like to hit someone, she’d know what it felt like not to hit someone, and she would be cured.” Nor does Wilder shy away from the most grotesque of imagery. In “The Butcher Shop,” a divorcé, suffering through a swanky steak dinner, loses a tooth, swallowing it in a sip of wine: “This felt strangely right and he imagined himself swigging Zinfandel and swallowing teeth, eyes, nose, arms, until he was nothing but a stomach digesting itself.” “We Were Champions” offers up bitter survival instead of a gut punch with the story of a woman’s reflections in the wake of the suicide of her high school baseball coach. Fortunately, Wilder offers readers a breather with “Creative Writing Instructor Evaluation Form,” which offers commentary like “The instructor looks like she might be willing to #&%@ a few of us.” The collection is nicely summed up with “You’re That Guy,” about a man trying to find reasons to live in the aftermath of his father’s death.
Excellent meditations on the human condition, well-suited to rest alongside the likes of Denis Johnson and Richard Ford.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02604-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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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