A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a...
Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.) delivers a cross-the-pond rejoinder to Philip Roth in this entertaining, sexually laden picaresque.
Frank Ritz, 50, gets paid for sitting around all day and watching television—literally. A prizewinning critic, he is surrounded by top-drawer media-consumer technology, his study a vision of “winking red and green lights…digitized all-knowingness, like the cabin of a jumbo jet.” The trouble is, his wife is firmly committed to the homespun life—anything to oppose Frank, it seems. Melissa writes what he calls “feministical-erotic novels” longhand; when she’s not doing so, she snipes at him for his choice of profession, even though, Frank fumes, “without his watching that crap all day she couldn’t afford the luxury of writing a hundred words a month.” Frank finds himself thrust outside the door, shed of his cocoon. And what’s a poor boy to do without his TV? Why, start chasing women of every description. “What a mystery girls were,” Frank ponders. “You just never knew what you were going to find. No wonder there were some men who never stopped.” Frank is relentless in his non-stopping, embarking on a sexual odyssey to do Molly Bloom proud, even as Jacobson fills in the background with sad and sordid tales of early misadventures with Scandinavian exchange students and flower children. The arrangements get a little complex at times, including one particularly odd and acrobatic threesome toward the end of the tale, eventually leading Frank more or less full circle. Will he find happiness? We can never quite be sure, but Frank is exuberant in his midlife freedom. Jacobson’s writing perfectly matches that mood, exemplified by a long passage, the literary equivalent of a filmic single-tracking shot, describing a walk along Oxford Street, “eyeballing policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, bus drivers, cab drivers, van drivers, street-sweepers,” and on and on, embracing the whole of humanity.
A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a false note.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-687-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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