There’s nothing flashy here, but each image, moment, and word counts and builds as the characters’ lives overlap—overlap in...
Life is an accumulation of told and, more importantly, untold stories in a quietly remarkable linked collection (a second from Lordan: And Both Shall Row, 1998) about a couple who retire to Ireland.
Lyle and Mary move from Ohio to Galway, where Mary grew up. In the early episodes, we watch them adjust in small yet telling ways to their new life within the old structure they’re used to in behaving with each other. Mary, ever patient but with a streak of independence, learns to discard her romanticized expectations, while gruff, seemingly oblivious Lyle finds ways to enjoy being an expatriate despite his loneliness. The marriage, like any long marriage, combines unspoken affection with barely hidden grievances, private longing with solicitousness. “Digging” goes back into the couple’s early romance, while in “The Man with the Lapdog,” Lyle befriends a tourist couple (a dying American teacher and his wife), but his attraction to the wife leads him back to an appreciation of Mary. In “Evening,” Mary has tea once with “the man of her dreams.” Two years later, after running into him on the street, she takes home his dog as a favor and Lyle is overjoyed to receive what Mary lets him assume is a birthday present as the other man’s abandoned pet becomes Lyle’s companion and solace. The first half of the book is largely about what makes Mary and Lyle a unit, but with Mary’s death from pneumonia, the narrative shifts, taking on a more forward momentum. Lyle is joined by the couple’s two grown sons, who were clearly closer to Mary than to Lyle. As the three men sort out their relationship, Mary becomes not a sentimental memory but a pervasive absence and cause of concrete grief—perhaps Lordan’s real subject.
There’s nothing flashy here, but each image, moment, and word counts and builds as the characters’ lives overlap—overlap in connections the more powerful for their subtlety.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053036-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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