The once reigning champion of redneck fiction continues his decline with yet another one-joke novel, a farce of hippy-cosmic dimensions. Set in a Florida trailer park for retirees (``a warehouse for the nearly dead''), this crude tale focuses on the life and peculiar powers of a white-trash beauty named ``Too Much,'' a girl who grew up with her anarchist granddaddy in the Florida swampland and whose name refers to her ample bust and bottom. ``Full of the curious and the strange,'' Too Much likes to drive the trailer park's owner to horned distraction. Stump, as he's called for his amputated arm, finds himself ``neck deep in kink'' with the young vixen, who clearly uses her wiles to a greater end, what she calls ``the chance of ultimate possibility,'' which comes from ``hope, faith, and the power of imagining the possible.'' Relying both on ``revealed knowledge'' and plain old madness, Too Much turns around the lives of all sorts of old-timers, from the octogenarian couple who can't stand the smell of each other to the ancient lumberjack who finds within himself the strength for one last job. Part of Too Much's plan is a Mayday celebration, complete with maypole and costumes, all intended to bring the ``touch of life'' to the old folks. With the help of a retired carpenter, a former bank president, and an itchy old pickpocket, Too Much takes over the community. Her can-do philosophy often works as shock therapy for the more stodgy residents, but most simply find joy in her exuberance. Stump, meanwhile, drowns himself in booze, waiting for his next session of outrageous sex with Too Much, who dispenses her favors shrewdly. Not unlike what's done in the film Cocoon, Crews (The Mulching of America, 1995, etc.) faces ``age and death and time'' with lots of simple bromides, barely disguised by all his tough-guy posturing and his primitive sexual notions. Lowbrow comedy, not literary wit.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83758-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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