An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.
A trend forecaster foresees a solution to the loneliness of this hyperconnected world.
Sloane Jacobsen, “soothsayer of the swipe,” is a hugely successful trend forecaster, having been the one to predict the now-ubiquitous thumb-to-phone motion. She is the “uber anti-mom,” believing that having children is shortsighted in a world where people have been becoming ever more self-centered. For this reason, she has been hired as a consultant by Mammoth, a tech company focusing on consumer electronics and “human-machine integration technology,” to help them prepare for a three-day summit bringing together tastemakers from around the world to consider the theme of “ReProduction”: “What will we make when we stop making kids?” Flying from Paris, where she has been living since the death of her father many years before, to New York brings her closer to her estranged family, and something is nagging at her soothsaying abilities. Very much against the wishes of Mammoth, she cannot help put predict a return to human touch, a “turning against tech.” This is also in direct opposition to the beliefs of her life partner, Roman, a neo-sensualist who has his own prediction: that nonpenetrative, nontactile sex—i.e. a sex life lived online—is the future of sexuality. He has begun, more and more, to wear a Zentai suit, which covers his entire body in a thin layer of Lycra and fetishizes detachment by making true skin-to-skin touch impossible. This discord allows Sloane the space to fall for another Mammoth employee who agrees with her about the return of physical contact and demonstrates his support corporeally. It also allows her to reconnect with her family. While the novel is highly engaging in its representation of the confusing and addictive tech-oriented world we live in, the outcome is predictable and obvious and made more quixotic by a last-ditch dive into the mystical. The exploration Maum (I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, 2014, etc.) is conducting in this book, of human vs. machine, is best served not in the overreaching discussion of global trends but in the more nuanced moments in which Sloane aches to sort out her own feelings.
An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1212-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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