A hodgepodge.
An ex-convict, his former girlfriend, a rich horse-dealer’s spoiled son, a preacher, a hooker, some gamblers, two low-wattage hired hands—these and others are scattered through this diffuse American debut.
What now for Ray Dokes, released from prison and returning to the farmland on the northern shore of Lake Erie? The possibilities meander on. Will he rekindle his relationship with one-time girlfriend Etta Parr, who fights to save a failing farm and to care for her father, whose mind is increasingly errant? Or will Ray violate parole and face off with Sonny Stanton, the nemesis behind Ray’s prison term? (The reasons for the sentence become apparent long before the narrative spells them out.) Will Pete Culpepper’s farm also go bankrupt? Will Ray somehow connect with Stanton’s dim farmhands, Dean and Paulie, clarifying at last why they, their barroom cohorts, and Misty, the exotic dancer they lust after, are part of the strung-together story? With Pete’s character sketched in (his father was never there for him), and his objectives vague (he may go to Texas with Pete), only a jerrybuilt ending provides some answers as it ties up the splintered plot. To save the farms, Ray has a horse trainer dye a kidnapped racehorse’s coat with drugstore hair dye so the championship stallion can pass for Pete’s injured horse and run a race. The imposter wins, of course, and the take saves the farms. Some may find amusement in Dean and Paulie’s attempt to force the championship horse to ejaculate so they can get rich marketing its semen. Many will tire of Smith’s too frequent, folksy similes: “The blond departed the stage . . . like a man caught cheating at cards.” The Ontario-based Smith sets all of this against a finely detailed rural Canadian background.
A hodgepodge.Pub Date: April 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7217-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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