Friendship across the great racial divide of the South is sensitively addressed in a novel that tries too hard to make a moving tale profound. Cox (Familiar Ground, 1984, etc.) here uses an awkward formula—letters to a father written in childhood mixed with alternating segments on the past and the immediate present—to tell the story of white Evie Bell and black Janey. The writing tends toward the awkward as well (``I missed his brows that could bring a soft rain'') as Cox strains for meaning and effect. It all begins with the funeral in Mercy, Georgia, of Volusia, Janey's mother, who for 12 years had been not only Evie's mother's housekeeper but best friend. When August, Evie's biologist father, left for good, Volusia and Janey moved in and shared the family house. Janey was also soon sharing Evie's room—though no one in the town was supposed to know: It was the '50s, and while the struggle for civil rights was becoming more evident, the South was still rigidly segregated. At night, after the lights were out, the two girls loved to talk, and each day after school they played together. But as Evie, now a teacher in Texas, visits her mother and Volusia's grieving second husband, she recalls—seeing Janey again—how difficult it was to keep up that close rapport as the outside world intervened. When Janey was 16, her brother Albert, a decorated Korean War hero, was badly beaten for his civil rights activities, and Janey was raped—events that served to strain the girls' friendship badly. Now, the murder of a white man on the eve of Volusia's funeral, a murder that Janey is accused of before being exonerated, reveals hidden secrets and renews the old, essential ties. An affecting celebration of the resilience of friendship, but undercut by its stock characters, who, despite nods to Faulkner and other southern greats, remain flat and unsurprising.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55597-267-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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