Almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we'll see this year and, flaws and all, probably one of the best.
An ambitious and frequently brilliant fictional exploration of the pursuit of pleasure and its ramifying consequences, by the antic author of Girl with Curious Hair (1989), etc.
In a manner both reminiscent and imitative of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Wallace traces the sometimes connected fortunes of two dozen or so addicted and obsessed souls variously involved with: the authoritarian cultivation of young minds and especially bodies at the Enfield (Mass.) Tennis Academy; the supervision of AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) patients at Ennet House, a Boston-area rehab facility; and the necessarily clandestine activities of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, which takes a dim and paranoid view of what most Americans accept as entertainment. And there's undoubtedly a link between the U.S. tour planned by a Quebec tennis team and the machinations of Québecois separatists, notably the Dr. Strangelovian Rémy Marathe, a triple- or possibly quadruple-agent struggling with his own surreptitious needs. In nearly a thousand pages of text and another hundred of amplificatory "Notes and Errata," Wallace plays a skillful set of exhaustive variations on these related plots and motifs (deformity and addiction crop up repeatedly). Major characters are the remarkable Incandenza brothers: tennis phenom and autodidact Harold, his brothers Orin and natally challenged Marion ("the family's real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type"), their unconventional mother Avril ("the Moms") and late father James (a suicide), whose career as an independent filmmaker will cast long shadows over his survivors' lives. They're surrounded, balanced, and thrown into fractious comic relief by such figures as the aforementioned Marathe, U.S.O.S. Chief Rodney Tine, and drug-ridden, violence-prone Don Gately, who labors erratically to save others and himself within the Stygian confines of Ennet House. It's a raucous, Falstaffian, deadly serious vision of a cartwheeling culture in the self-pleasuring throes of self-destruction, marred only by its author's unaccountable fondness for farcical acronyms (also from Pynchon) and dumb jokes (not that there aren't dozens of good ones as well).
Almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we'll see this year and, flaws and all, probably one of the best.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-92004-5
Page Count: 1088
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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