A rollicking satire.
A happy-go-lucky polygamist weds his way through post-war American history in this bawdy picaresque.
Setting out from the Idaho orphanage where he was raised (and sexually tutored), 16-year-old Shiver Me Timbers (other porn-ish aliases include Casper Wyoming and John Doe) confronts the 1960s with nothing but callow good looks and a ready-for-anything attitude. The sex-starved women of America are waiting for him, and the result over the ensuing decades is 12 marriages and countless extramarital couplings with everyone from an evangelical Nixon-supporter to a Betsy Ross impersonator. Shiver marries for love, money or the hell of it, and moves on because of boredom or gunfire. (He’s a Catholic, so, of course, he never gets divorced.) His wives run the gamut—there’s the flower child who joins the Symbionese Liberation Army, the pre-op transsexual in deep with the mob, the three simultaneous wives whom he picks up as a traveling vacuum-cleaner salesman and juggles until they become deranged from sniffing hog pheromones and, yes, the 14-toed lesbian heiress who tries to kill him on their wedding night. Von Osten regales readers with gonzo misadventures—captured by naked druids, Shivers narrowly avoids becoming a virgin sacrifice by demonstrating that he is not a virgin—in prose that fairly chortles with coy salaciousness. (“‘Does it hurt?’ Dolores cooed, observing my youthful vigor while moving her hands from tending her own rose garden.”) But Shivers’ relationships are so sketchy that the narrative often wanders away—to digressions on everything from the Bermuda triangle, to Ernest Hemingway’s Paris days, to local travelogue (“Philadelphia hosted both the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress”), to anti-imperialist soap-boxing against every foreign-policy misdeed from the annexation of Hawaii to Operation Desert Storm. Von Osten has a time-honored satirical mission—to deflate America’s pretenses by revealing a panorama of lust and greed—but Shivers is too feckless a character to carry that weight.
A rollicking satire.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1456376475
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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