Pleasant frivolities, with just a refreshing dash of cynicism and attitude.
Kureishi (The Black Album, 1995, etc.), well known for his screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette and Rosie and Sammie Get Laid, offers up an inveterately thin but generally amusing novel about recovering from the debilitating legacy of the rock-and-hippie world of the ’60s.
Things are seen from the consciousness of 15-year-old Gabriel Bunch, but the person who desperately needs recovery-therapy is his father Rex, a musician who hit his peak way back when he played with the fabulously successful (and still popular) Lester Jones. Ever since, though, he’s been in a slow downward spiral that, as book opens, has resulted in his being kicked out of the house by Gabriel’s mother Christine and holing up in a single room that’s very sordid indeed. Why did it happen? Well, Rex, witheringly called “an old hippie” by a fed-up Christine, is idealistic about his art and won’t compromise it—resulting in the permanent absence both of work and money. The solution? Gabriel, who has a way with his father, is the one who gets Dad a job teaching music to the troubled son of a movie mogul with deep pockets, a job that leads to others like it and to an all-new Rex (he likes the work) and a reunion with Christine. There are certain complications in the bringing of all this about—including a meeting with demigod Lester Jones himself, who is smitten by the young Gabriel and immediately recognizes his art-talent (he even makes a picture for him, which Rex then hocks). Amusing deceptions, misunderstandings, and setbacks precede the happy end, including Christine’s (“Don’t shout at me. I’m a single mother and I’ve got a headache!”) troubles with men and jobs and Gabriel’s Delphic communings with his dead identical twin brother Archie, who offers advice both on art and on parent management.
Pleasant frivolities, with just a refreshing dash of cynicism and attitude.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1711-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
SEEN & HEARD
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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