Nearing age 60, William B. Dubin, biographer of Twain and Thoreau and (soon) D. H. Lawrence, wonders if he has "given up life to write lives." And one has to wonder if that's what Bernard Malamud is wondering—because this is his least symbolic, most seemingly autobiographical novel, a bleached, gray book that (like so much semi-autobiographical work) is only intermittently affecting despite the restrained allure of Malamud's fiercely polished, gently mocking prose. Like Malamud, Dubin is a Jewish man of letters who married at 31, has two grown children, and lives in Vermont; Dubin's wife Kitty was a widow with a small son when they "married as strangers holding to strange pasts"—he answered her discreet personal ad in The Nation And now they're alone together in often-snowbound Vermont, where rigorous Dubin slaves away at turning a desk covered with index cards into a life of Lawrence. Then, as if by some Lawrentian erotic command, voila!—Fanny Bick, a sometime student and sometime house-cleaner, whose casual sexual invitation Dubin at first rejects, then welcomes in adulterous excursions to Venice (a fiasco of nausea and betrayal as Fanny makes it with a gondolier) and Manhattan. Dubin, "bored with the bounds of marriage," sneaks and lies and revels in Fanny's demanding, inventive appetites (Malamud's conscientiously energetic erotica never quite convinces), but the rest of his life fizzles: he cuckolds, and loses, his only neighbor-friend; adopted son Gerry, an army deserter, has disappeared somewhere in Russia; daughter Maud is an unmarried, pregnant Berkeley Buddhist (though far more appealing than neurotic sex kitten Fanny). Worst of all, level-headed wife Kitty becomes understandably suspicious, especially when Dubin falls impotent, and the resulting kitchen/bedroom exchanges provide some of the most genuinely hurtful marital combat since Strindberg. "He lived in six sheets of glass, shouting soundless pleas for freedom," writes Malamud, and the apparently reconciliatory ending he provides for Dubin doesn't ring true. And neither does the joyful, risky rebirth through Fanny. What does come through is enough pain and aloneness (Dubin trudging through the snow, with no company but D. H. Lawrence) to make this a monumentally sad book brightened only by the inspiring, cheering perfection of Malamud's line-by-line, word-by-word artistry.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1978
ISBN: 0374528829
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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