Not as wildly lyrical or funny as A Fan's Notes, it's nevertheless a frighteningly believable portrait of a self-created...
Newsweek critic Gates debuts with the fictional memoirs of drunk in his midlife state of emergency: a sad suburban tale of failure, self-degradation, and the obliteration of consciousness, relieved only by the narrator's sardonic sense of humor.
Raised by his artist father, Peter Jernigan rejected bohemia for the promise of middle-class bliss in New Jersey. He commutes from his ``split-level shitbox'' to his Manhattan job in real estate until, a year or so before his 40th birthday, things fall apart with a vengeance. It begins when his wife dies in a drunken suicidal accident during a July 4th barbecue. Jernigan's teen-aged son, Danny, retreats farther into heavy-metal euphoria, and Jernigan's drinking increases exponentially. On the first anniversary of his wife's death, he meets the mother of Danny's girlfriend, the latter a 14-year-old recovering heroin addict who now does only pot and acid. When Jernigan is fired from his job, he and Danny move in with their women, and Jernigan spends his days getting sloshed. His endless boozing is interrupted by a series of nightmarish incidents (Danny's girlfriend has a bad trip; a friend of Danny's shoots himself to death on the living-room sofa), and, at the same time, Jernigan's uncontrollable sense of irony turns into bitter sarcasmhe's a mean drunk, forever mocking the cultural illiteracy of those around him. Just when it seems he can go no lower, he splits for a trailer in New Hampshire, seeking total retreat and oblivion, but ends up in a treatment center, writing these frank confessions. Gates adeptly captures the disparity between what Jernigan says and what he means, what he's thinking and what actually happensand none of it's pretty.
Not as wildly lyrical or funny as A Fan's Notes, it's nevertheless a frighteningly believable portrait of a self-created hell.Pub Date: June 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40237-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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