Somewhat reminiscent of Leaving Las Vegas, but Gowdy’s version of booze-thwarted love shows considerably more complexity,...
In this tender romantic tragedy by the ever-insightful Gowdy (The White Bone, 1999, etc.), love’s labors lead to naught when a long but not easily entwined couple let alcohol come between them.
Skittering back and forth across more than a decade of Louise Kirk’s involvement with Abel Richter, the narrative opens in 1960, when Abel moves into ten-year-old Louise’s Toronto neighborhood not long after her mother abruptly walked out. Seeking a surrogate, Louise is drawn first to Abel’s larger-than-life mother, but soon she attends more to the quiet, gentle boy who never speaks ill of anyone. Louise is inclined to rage, however, and as time passes Abel gives her plenty of reason. His family moves to Vancouver not long after they realize they love each other, and Abel doesn’t answer any of her letters, but when he comes back for a visit Louise throws herself at him with such abandon that she immediately becomes pregnant. He doesn’t know, though, having returned to Vancouver, and when Louise flies out to tell him she finds him kissing someone else. She aborts with the aid of her herb-wise housekeeper and gets on with her life. A determined underachiever, she follows a stint as a bookstore clerk with a secretarial job for a semiretired broker and dallies with a draft dodger from the States. But she knows that the Richters have returned to Toronto, and when word comes that her mother has died, followed shortly by the urn containing her ashes, it’s to Abel that she turns for comfort. Unfortunately, he’s already well down the alcoholic path to self-destruction, and Louise is just in time to help him enter his final phase.
Somewhat reminiscent of Leaving Las Vegas, but Gowdy’s version of booze-thwarted love shows considerably more complexity, and her focus is squarely on the survivor.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7190-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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