“He had made love to her so well that she hated him”: a steamy Belgian bestseller makes its way across the pond.
Buttocks, breasts, orgasms, parakeets; life isn’t all chocolate and roses on the Place d’Arezzo, but it’s not too bad, either, especially if you’re Zachary Bidermann, who, by virtue of being “a trained economist,” has climbed the ladder all the way up to the more ethereal elevations of the European Union. He also enjoys a priapic second career, though not indiscriminately; he would never dream, say, of entangling himself with his secretary, Madame Singer, who, à la a certain presidential candidate, wears “a tight navy blue pantsuit” and a thin smile. Madame Singer may be shapeless and humorless, but she knows a thing or two about the world. So does M. de Couvigne, a prominent banker who, among other things, is called to explain to a young son that certain men enjoy kissing each other as “a mommy and daddy do,” then is delighted when the kid reacts with revulsion at the thought. Of course, kids find kissing pretty icky anyway, but no matter; just about everyone in this book, the first full-length novel by Schmitt (Three Women in a Mirror, 2013, etc.) to appear in English, is pretty icky, too, man and woman and bird alike. (Yes, bird.) The story picks up when news of Zachary’s epic thrusting gets out, and suddenly he’s seen not as a charming Casanova but instead as the creepy kin of Dominique Strauss-Kahn: “While your own wife was just a few yards away, throwing a party in your honor, you forced yourself on a poor woman!” shouts a colleague, to which Zachary merely shrugs. The takedown, hundreds of pages in the coming, so to speak, is well-deserved. Still, Schmitt’s novel too often verges on high-minded smut; at those points, it’s a Jacqueline Susann yarn with fewer drugs and better furniture. Birds, too.
Middling literary erotica: not quite Kundera but raw enough to satisfy a curious teenager.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-346-6
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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