Busch at his best: nobody does it better.
A legacy of suffering, betrayal, and guilt inexorably pursues, and shapes, the protagonist of Busch’s powerfully developed 19th novel (The Night Inspector, 1999, etc.).
In a seamless fusion of scene, dialogue, and reminiscence, Busch draws us into the turbulent psyche of Manhattan psychologist Alexander Lescziak, the only child of Polish refugees who had escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to England, then America. Alex’s wife Liz is in love with another man (his colleague, as it happens). His own affair with a possibly suicidal patient, Nella Grensen, has been abruptly terminated when Nella simply disappears. And his new patient—reserved, saturnine William Kessler—claims he is Lescziak’s half-brother: the child of Alex’s late mother Sylvia and a German POW she had met in England. The intensity with which these and other relationships are explored is heightened by Busch’s deft employment of interior monologue, notably in sequences where Alex remembers his own past, and also imagines in heartrending detail his mother’s adultery and enduring grief. Busch is also a virtuoso maker of revelatory extended metaphors (e.g., “ [Alex’s] mind falling away from him like liquid carried by a small child in a heavy pot . . .”). But the heart of the story is contained in Lescziak’s long, wrenching conversations (in which he assumes the roles of mentor, seeker, and victim): with the appalling Kessler (a self-styled “historian” who denies that the Holocaust occurred), his dying father Januscz (his patient), a violence-prone transit policeman and Vietnam veteran, the woman detective who investigates Nella’s disappearance, the wife he’s losing and the friend (Teddy Levenson) to whom he’s losing her—each a firmly defined, unforgettable character. We come to know Alexander Lescziak as fully as we know any character in contemporary fiction, thanks to the wizardry of one of the great living masters of fictional technique.
Busch at his best: nobody does it better.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04978-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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