Djerassi, a Stanford chemistry professor and the man who developed the first oral contraceptive, expressed his fascination with scientists' hunger for recognition in his first two novels (The Bourbaki Gambit, 1994; Cantor's Dilemma, 1989). His hero this time is not so different: a Pulitzer-winning novelist who so longs to know how he'll be ranked among the greats that he fakes his own death to read his obituaries. The problem with being an artist, Stephen Marx likes to say, is that there's no hierarchical structure within which one can gauge one's success or lack thereof. Working in isolation, answerable only to a faceless and generally silent public, a serious writer can count how many copies of his books sell, but how can he be sure that his work is good enough to survive through the ages? So caught up with this question is Marx (despite his Pulitzer), and so apathetic about the way his personal life is dragging along, that he arranges to fake his own death by drowning so that he can read the posthumous summations. Marx's ruse works, and he flees undetected to an anonymous life in San Francisco—but then, of course, complications ensue. First, Noah Berg, Marx's cruelest but most engaged critic, drops all plans for a book about Marx when he falls in love with Marx's ``widow,'' Miriam. Then a beautiful but nosy Columbia Journalism School student acting on a hunch hunts Marx down and threatens to expose him unless he helps her write her own biography of the author. Amidst all this turmoil, Marx is never really able to pin down his true worth as a writer- -but as the burden of his reputation is lifted, he finds himself freed to create in new and exciting ways, ensuring a slew of brilliant if anonymous novels to come. Charming characters and clever prose, though few readers are likely to care about the issue of peer review as much as Djerassi evidently does.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-8203-1835-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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