An original, insightful debut that doesn’t quite fit in a box—but checks them all.
A bighearted, eccentric millennial navigates her messy coming-of-age in Los Angeles.
Duncan’s unique debut follows a fictional Fiona Alison Duncan, a writer who moves from New York City to Los Angeles. In LA, Fiona sublets a room in an apartment called La Mariposa and begins dreaming up a reality show starring herself and her broke, beautiful, 20-something roommates. In their search for “the Real” (an almost unattainable state of living), Fiona pitches the show as “A real Real World” before realizing the inherent inauthenticity: “But the means I sought to make our dreams known were too mixed up in the Dream. To be seen, moneyed, on-screen.” So she breaks the contract and writes a novel (this novel) instead. Along with thoughtful insights about capitalism, feminism, and politics, the novel is full of fads and trends: Instagram, social media branding, astrology, vegan ice cream, and nutritional yeast to name a few. In one clever moment, Duncan addresses the way trends exist within greater power structures: “Astrology’s gone in and out of style before; right now, it’s peaking in popularity, because people are desperate for a meaning system more nourishing than capitalism.” The novel also ruminates on the knottiness of money, work, female ambition, art, and power. Fiona is a writer who struggles with her artistic impulse to capture the world in a medium that will always fall short. She writes that “what [she] made was never as beautiful as the reality it reached toward,” and yet she tries. The novel is highbrow and lowbrow; about everything and nothing; and wholly of this particular cultural moment—in a good way. If there were such a thing as a “millennial novel,” this is how it should be defined: chaotic, earnest, honest, and curious. Duncan has written a sharp and astute work of metafiction
An original, insightful debut that doesn’t quite fit in a box—but checks them all.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59376-578-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
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
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