Laid-back lowlifes struggle for power, survival, and their 15 minutes of fame in a plot as busy and chaotic as the original...
Leonard’s 37th backs smooth and easy into Tunica, Mississippi, site of the shaggiest crime tale he’s spun since Maximum Bob (1991).
Normally, the critical moment in Dennis Lenahan’s high dives is the instant his body hits the water. But the final day he’s been setting up his rig at Billy Darwin’s Tishomingo Lodge & Casino, that moment comes as he hears the two guys he’s been watching below execute Floyd Showers, the ex-con who’d been helping him rig the ladders and the perch above. The killers—extortionist Arlen Novis and Junior Owens, who runs Arlen’s honky-tonk—look up 80 feet and see him as clearly as he sees them, and although Charlie Hoke, the alleged half-Chickasaw ex-ballplayer who serves as the casino’s celebrity host, assures them of Dennis’s discretion, there’s no doubt that his position in Tunica has been compromised before he’s even made his first dive. Dennis needs a friend—somebody like Robert Taylor, the soft-spoken black man whose illustrated patter about how his grandfather was lynched by the great-grandfather of moneyed mobile home salesman Walter Kirkbride is so well-oiled that it’s obviously a front for some con Dennis can’t identify. What he doesn’t need is the attention he catches from dangerous women like newscaster Diane Corrigan-Cochrane, who asks him if it’s true that he witnessed Floyd’s murder, and Loretta Novis, Arlen’s willing wife. And he certainly doesn’t need any part of the Civil War reenactment of the battle of Brice’s Cross Roads that will sweep him up together with state investigator John Rau and the Dixie Mafiosi he’s trying to put away, as Leonard (Pagan Babies, 2000, etc.) revels in layers upon layers of playacting and posturing.
Laid-back lowlifes struggle for power, survival, and their 15 minutes of fame in a plot as busy and chaotic as the original battle of Brice’s Cross Roads.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000872-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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