Wickedly funny and sharply observant, in the author’s vintage manner, with a warmth that softens the satire just enough.
With her customary sure hand, veteran novelist Prose (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, 2014, etc.) trains various points of view on the shabby dramatization of a popular children’s book.
Mister Monkey, as summarized in the prologue, is the simplistic, bestselling tale of an orphaned African chimp adopted by an affluent Manhattan family, unjustly accused by the widowed father’s scheming girlfriend, and saved by the lawyer Portia, who (of course) turns out to be Dad’s new love. The even tackier musical version is first seen through the weary eyes of Margot, the middle-aged actress playing Portia and valiantly applying her Yale Drama–honed technique to a tawdry production whose pubescent star, Adam, has started using Mister Monkey’s interactions with the lawyer as an excuse to hump Margot onstage. Moving into Adam’s consciousness, Prose makes poignantly manifest the family issues that prompted his bad behavior, and she elicits similar empathy for the damaged characters who serially pick up the narrative from there: a grieving widower and his grandson Edward in the audience; Edward’s kindergarten teacher, who winds up on a disastrous blind date at a restaurant seated next to Mister Monkey’s author; the waiter Mario, also lonely and bereaved, who provides the novel’s hopeful final development based on totally false premises. Prose hilariously nails the down-at-the-heels milieu—poor Margot is stuck in a ridiculous wig and hideous costume mandated by the pretentious director—while also evoking the magic even low-rent theater can inspire in the narratives of the show’s costume designer (an underpaid NYU grad student), the moonlighting emergency room nurse who plays the villainess, and the director, whose closing monologue reveals someone much kinder than his prior treatment of Margot suggested.
Wickedly funny and sharply observant, in the author’s vintage manner, with a warmth that softens the satire just enough.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239783-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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