An uneven debut offering an imagination a touch too fond of novelty, a bit too carried away with its own fictive swagger,...
Brock follows his debut novel (The Ordinary White Boy, p. 960) with a prizewinning first collection of 14 stories: a flat if engaging thrum along the themes of loss and despair, in working-class upstate New York, in which mostly male characters find themselves confused in midlife.
While not masterful in his execution, Brock is inventive in his devices: in “Starving,” “a group of fathers in Little Falls decided . . . to starve themselves to death.” Despairing over their sons’ failures in marriage and work, the dads wage a group hunger strike—and thus enact a parable of father/son relational dynamics writ large. In “Specify the Learners,” an adult male finds himself in 6th grade again. Having failed the grade as a boy, and believing that failure to be the source of all his future shame, he seeks to mend the youthful gap—but finds his teacher, as well as a young girl, sexually attracted to him. Such extreme situations are a staple of Brock’s fiction here: a man’s hand is severed (in “Compensation”), and its recovery raises deep questions about loyalty and duty to a friend In “Plowing the Secondaries,” another man falls in love, plans a future with, and finally has his heart broken by a corpse of a woman tossed into a snowbank. And in “She Loved to Cook But Not Like This,” a man introduces himself as the arsonist behind the burning of the Emily Dickenson house in Amherst.. The most conventional story here, “The World, Dirty Like a Heart,” details the breakdown of a high-school teacher’s marriage after a colleague falls in love with a 17-year-old student. The author’s rare attempt to narrate in a woman’s voice, “A Cabin on a Lake,” is unconvincing, and lacks the gritty, mauled prose of the other pieces here.
An uneven debut offering an imagination a touch too fond of novelty, a bit too carried away with its own fictive swagger, and a bit too droll in its emotional reticence to capture a reader’s enduring interest.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-889330-67-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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