Superb portraits of an endearing heroine and a cluster of finely observed secondary characters backlit by history, their...
Fresh, captivating coming-of-age story from poet and novelist Leithauser (A Few Corrections, 2001, etc.).
Detroit, 1943. In a crowded streetcar, a young soldier on crutches gallantly insists on a pretty young woman taking the one vacant seat. It’s a Norman Rockwell moment, and Bea Paradiso, an 18-year-old art student, will cherish it. Her family considers her overemotional; certainly she is ardent and impressionable. Soon she will find an outlet for her patriotism, visiting the hospital to sketch wounded soldiers, giving them back their “prewar faces.” The visits provide an escape from home, in turmoil since Bea’s deranged mother accused her sister, sweet Aunt Grace, of trying to steal her husband Vico, an immigrant building contractor. The accusation is absurd—Grace has her own wonderfully happy marriage—but it will have dire consequences. Bea also finds respite in the company of fellow art student Ronny Olsson, handsome, talented, provocative and heir to the city’s largest drugstore chain. Their first kiss is a riot of colors, appropriate for “two kids in love with painting.” Then Bea’s feelings are diverted toward another soldier, Henry Vanden Akker, a brilliant truth-seeking mathematician. Transcending cliché, Bea gives up her virginity the night before Henry returns to the war, though she knows (second sight) that he’s doomed. After he does indeed die in a plane crash, fragile Bea seems headed for an early death herself, the victim of a flu epidemic and her shattered nerves. But Leithauser spares her, and another 200 pages show her, nine years later, happily married with twins. This allows the author more space to examine, with the perceptiveness of Anne Tyler, how families work, but the novel’s portrait of wartime fervor is so haunting that showing us Bea’s later life, no matter how fulfilled, seems like adding a wing to an already perfect house.
Superb portraits of an endearing heroine and a cluster of finely observed secondary characters backlit by history, their brilliance slightly dimmed in the lower-keyed Part Three.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27111-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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