A quartet of isolated personalities drift the streets of post-9/11 New York in Bollen’s debut literary novel.
Joseph Giteau graduated high school in Cincinnati, immediately left his reclusive, conspiracy-obsessed mother and moved to New York. Delphine Kousavos left a tiny Greek island and entered Columbia University. Madi and Raj Singh left a fractured biracial Florida home and found success in the Big Apple. The four characters’ stories intertwine in this postmodern tale, seemingly random and chaotic on the surface but layered with existential malaise and good intentions gone wrong. Joseph found success as an actor, mostly in commercials, and mostly because of his good looks. But Joseph believes, though he admits his fear to no one, that he will die this year, his 35th, of heart failure, as did his father and grandfathers. Del drifted into a job as a reptile curator at the Bronx Zoo, a profession she dislikes enough to persuade Joseph, her lover of 10 months, to marry her so that she might stay in the country without a work visa. Madi, Del’s closest friend from college, is the most successful of the four, a vice-president of a company outsourcing jobs to India. Raj, a talented photographer and Del’s former lover, has fallen into an unidentifiable depression. Circling the group is William Asternathy, also an actor. William’s looks are fading, and his career has been derailed by drugs and the party scene sparked by “that fast live-wire current circulating through the city." Another narrative opens when Joseph meets Aleksandra Andrews, widow of a suicide, a man embroiled in utility-deregulation fraud. Told in third person, there is symbolism to be contemplated, internal dialogue to define character and flashbacks that make Joseph the most sympathetic of the four. Nevertheless, in this realistic tale of love and loss, love and ambivalence, angst and anger, death deliberate and accidental, there are no heroes.
A dark character study rife with paradox and indirection.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59376-419-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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