A dull, slow-moving second novel.
A young fiddler leaves home with a twofold mission: to make it big in Nashville and to find his father.
Jesse Alison has been living alone with his mother in Vermont since his singer/guitarist father, Hank, abandoned them when Jesse was eight. Now Jesse is 19, and it’s time for him to leave, too. He loves his mother, but her neediness overwhelms him. (Their situation is reminiscent of the mother-son relationship in Spatz’s debut, No One But Us, 1995.) Jesse has won statewide fiddle contests, though with his father absent, the victories felt hollow; his idol is bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe, and his dream is to be one of his Bluegrass Boys. Driving south, Jesse gets some bad news: Monroe has had a heart attack. In Nashville he stays with Genny, a former Vermont neighbor and second mother to him. She’s a lesbian who makes and repairs violins. Genny introduces him to the lively Nashville scene; it’s a shame Spatz renders it so tepidly, concentrating on Jesse’s immersion in the sounds of his fellow musicians rather than the human interactions. Jesse has a bright future, but before lining up any gigs, he moves on to Mississippi to track down his father, taking with him a red violin Genny has been repairing. Jesse finds Hank living with Grace, a black gospel singer, and managing her career; he no longer plays himself. It’s an awkward reunion. Jesse wants details of his past, but Hank can’t tell him much, not even his birthplace; he wasn’t around. He admits to being “a dog and a coward,” but Jesse knew that already. His reality check does lead to one epiphany: He will never be a Bluegrass Boy. Monroe had been a fantasy father, and it’s too late to join his family.
A dull, slow-moving second novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-87074-508-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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