Miss Welty's South, the hill country of Northeast Mississippi, is once again like its catalpa trees in full bloom. On the first page, the marvelous descriptive power which carries so much of her writing makes itself felt—"Then a house appeared on its ridge, like an old man's silver watch pulled once more out of its pocket." This is her first book in some fifteen years; a writer of short stories and shorter novels, this is her first attempt to transpose the minor work of art into a major achievement and one of its losing battles may well be its length, testing the patience of those outside the cult. Here and there, during this mighty get-together, the reunion of a family on the 90th birthday (she says 100th) of Granny Vaughn, some of it runs to grass. It's the occasion when Granny expects to "see all the great-great-grandchildren they care to show me" along with her clutch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Granny's mind sometimes slips, and well through this memorable day she's asking for her presents; they're all around her—a prayer plant or a new apron or a sodabox full of sage. The day is also remarkable in that after two years, one of the great-grandchildren, Jack, is being released from the pen—to join them and his wife and his baby (although for a time it seems he might lose them both to a lurching car—an episode which with its retrieval is one of the many comic scenes). He's not the kind to give up; nor is his wife Gloria (who grew up an orphan never knowing who was her father) nor is the former schoolteacher of Banner who attempted to block their marriage. She was the most embattled of them all. . . . Miss Welty once defined the novel as "reflections and visions of all life we know compounded through art." Along with her blood knowledge of the South which has earned those many comparisons with Faulkner, there is her cosmic vision—part innocence, part forgiveness ("the besetting sin" in this house), part comedy, an ever-flowing affection for all that walks and crawls and creeps, and in conjunction with the homemade pleasures, the more mysterious penultimates. They're all here.
Pub Date: April 13, 1970
ISBN: 0679728821
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
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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