As the clues pile up, the coming storm is expertly foreshadowed—but when it arrives, it's utterly surprising.
A sojourn in a Sicilian village sorely tests the relationships of two couples.
Ephron’s fourth novel is clearly being told in retrospect by each of the four middle-aged tourists whose lives have exploded in a manner not revealed until the end. It starts innocuously enough, as an ironic travelogue about American sophisticates abroad, first in Rome and then in the ancient coastal town of Siracusa. Finn and Taylor, from Portland, Maine, and their Botticelli-blonde 10-year-old, Snow, are traveling with their New York friends Lizzie, a magazine writer, and her novelist husband, Michael. Finn, a restaurateur, and Lizzie had a fling years ago that still resonates with each of them. Taylor, an heiress who dabbles in the tourism industry, is mainly concerned about Snow, who suffers from “extreme shyness syndrome.” Snow is captivated by Michael, who clearly knows how to flatter females of all ages. He’s currently enmeshed in an affair with a younger woman, Kath, a hostess at his and Lizzie’s favorite Italian eatery back home. Lizzie chalks Michael’s aloofness up to his novel in progress based on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. From Rome, Michael frantically texts and emails Kath, receiving no response. None, that is, until the group arrives in Siracusa and Kath turns up at their hotel, ostensibly by coincidence. By this time Michael had given up on Kath and Lizzie was heartened by her husband’s renewed attentiveness. The situation begins to resemble a Ford Madox Ford novel, with each narrator recounting and interpreting the same encounters from vastly differing perspectives. Finn resents Michael for his casual callousness toward Lizzie, Michael is torn between two women. (Under duress, he buys Kath a gaudy ring.) Taylor detests their no-star hotel, and Lizzie fails to suspect anything even when she sees Kath wearing a man’s shirt identical to Michael’s and carrying a copy of The Red and the Black.
As the clues pile up, the coming storm is expertly foreshadowed—but when it arrives, it's utterly surprising.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16521-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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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