Nicholson (Female Ruins, 2000, etc.), smart and mercilessly funny when skewering the myopic anxieties of the literary world...
A refreshing amusement about one Mike Smith, who impersonates a literary friend and ends up teaching creative writing at an insane asylum.
Nicholson’s is an engagingly fluent voice, by turns funny and smart, yet sometimes also distant from events, offering detached commentary when a direct grappling might satisfy. This time, in his 14th outing, things open promisingly as Mike Smith attends an ironic “book burning” party at the home of Dr. John Bentley, an Oxford don. Just after Smith submits Bentley’s volume of criticism to the flames, his friend Gregory Collins tosses the manuscript of his own first novel into the ashes. Smith, gifted with striking good looks, is contacted considerably later (the two friends parted ways after graduating) by Collins, who has a proposal: Smith will pose for the jacket photograph of Collins’s new novel and, in exchange, will get a break from his humdrum job selling pricey used books. Smith—now Collins in the world’s eyes—agrees, and, after a public reading, is invited to become writer-in-residence at the Kincaid Clinic, an all-purpose insane asylum presided over by Dr. James Kincaid. Here, he learns the “Kincaid Method,” a form of therapy designed to rid patients of the images rustling in their imaginations. One can quickly see the problems this might pose for creative writing. Yet the students’ writing is both voluminous and startlingly good—good enough to be published as an anthology edited by the original novelist, Gregory Collins. The volume is reviewed widely and well—until a review is submitted to a journal declaring the entire enterprise a fraud. Soon, the very authorship of the writings, as well as the authenticity of the editing, become dubious, and Nicholson’s tale concludes as the whole madhouse goes up in flames.
Nicholson (Female Ruins, 2000, etc.), smart and mercilessly funny when skewering the myopic anxieties of the literary world and those aspiring to join it, is less entertaining—because less persuasive—when retailing the antics and atmosphere of the Clinic.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-239-4
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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