Structural weaknesses aside, a subtle, engaging novel.
Predatory love wreaks havoc on two lives in the latest novel from Baxter (Saul and Patsy, 2003, etc.).
Nathaniel Mason is a grad student in Buffalo in 1973. He’s going to a party with a beautiful fellow student, Theresa; they’ve just met, and Nathaniel’s intrigued. The party throbs with “hysterical intellectualism”; its high priest is the impossibly brainy Jerome Coolberg, who draws Nathaniel into his circle. Though Theresa and Jerome are lovers, the latter now becomes obsessed with Nathaniel; he starts appropriating his life story and even stealing his clothes. An open, innocent Midwesterner, Nathaniel is an easy mark. He helps out at a kitchen for down-and-outs where he meets Jamie, a lesbian sculptor and cabdriver. In this world of fluid sexual identities, he sleeps with both Theresa and Jamie until, wham! He plunges headlong into the magnificent confusion of first love—for Jamie. A fire destroys the kitchen; Jamie is raped by a gang and leaves town; Nathaniel has a breakdown but, sheltered by his family, makes a very slow recovery. Years later, Nathaniel is a solid citizen with a family of his own: A devoted, guileless wife and two teenage sons. Out of the blue, Jerome calls. He has found the perfect niche as host of a public radio show, burrowing into the lives of his guests; he insists Nathaniel visit him in Los Angeles. During their reunion it emerges that Jerome was behind the attack on Jamie, of whom he was insanely jealous. He thought he could control the narrative of Nathaniel’s life and has kept tabs on him ever since. The problem here is that Jerome doesn’t radiate the sinister power he should, and the meeting is an anti-climax. The antidote to Jerome’s poison is compassionate love, and Baxter excels at highlighting its manifestations.
Structural weaknesses aside, a subtle, engaging novel.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42252-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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