Somebody is going to make a terrific movie out of Wide Blue Yonder. It’s a pretty terrific novel.
The unsparing realism displayed in Thompson’s story collections The Gasoline Wars (1979) and Who Do You Love (1999) is blended with a new (and very welcome) warmth and humor in her bighearted third novel: it reads like a journey into Anne Tyler country, with Thomas Berger and John Irving along for the ride.
The opening 50-plus pages comprise a master class in expository technique, as Thompson introduces us to four vividly imagined characters, lays out their interrelationships, and sets them on a collision course that leads inexorably to a (ever so slightly forced) melodramatic climax. Reclusive Harvey Sloan, a.k.a. “Local Forecast,” lives in mentally deranged squalor in a rundown house (in Springfield, Illinois) that’s a shrine to his inexplicable fixation on TV weather programs. His sister-in-law Elaine is an aging divorcée burdened by her demanding “home accessories” business and her rebellious teenager Josie—and also by her ex-husband’s neglect of (his brother) hopeless Uncle Harvey (whose many problems include incipient blindness). Meanwhile, in LA, ethnic misfit Rolando Gottschalk, an unstable petty criminal, begins making his way east, graduating to increasingly dangerous misbehavior. And Josie’s whirlwind affair with a handsome cop hits the skids, sending her to Uncle (actually, he’s her great-uncle) Harvey’s house for sanctuary, just as Harvey is refusing cataract surgery and planning to wed his non-English–speaking cleaning lady Rosa, and Rolando, “armed and crazy” and hallucinating at full throttle, descends on Springfield. The long denouement is fairly contrived. But readers won’t mind, because its characters are so eccentric and engaging they all but leap off the pages. The mother-daughter warfare between Josie and Elaine is blissfully, murderously funny and touching, while Thompson performs little miracles of tact and suggestiveness with both Rolando’s (really scary)dementia and Harvey’s occluded, motley point of view (though the eventual explanation of what drove him crazy is awfully topical and predictable).
Somebody is going to make a terrific movie out of Wide Blue Yonder. It’s a pretty terrific novel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0512-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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