Elliptical, unsettling and strangely fascinating.
A New Jersey gallery owner accompanies a traveling salesman on an impressionistic, campy circumnavigation of the South in Sher’s follow-up to Gentlemen of Space (2003).
Milton Menger is a strange man who speaks in double negatives, digressing frequently on art, metaphysics, dreams and history. His decision to come to the aid of Singer Sewing Company representative Charley Trembleman, an ex-painter whose hands have been burned in a motel fire, isn’t purely altruistic; Menger is fleeing his estranged wife and a personal darkness that lurks in the margins of his narrative. The pair stop off in sewing-machine stores, small-town bars, art museums and seedy motels. They encounter oracles and sirens: an old man who divines Civil War artifacts with his metal detector, a sexy but sinister fellow Singer Sewing Company agent who pursues them across the South. Terrible things happen to the people around Menger, but he remains clinical, obsessed with the specters of a Civil War–era painter and the Singer Company’s founder, Isaac Singer. Menger is hyperaware that mass production and its mechanisms (sewing machines, guns, automobiles) have forever changed the world; he is haunted by hidden patterns and metaphors. The narrative’s appeal lies in its characters’ obsessions, phobias and omissions; Menger and Trembleman are fugitives from change who seek refuge in transitory places and in lofty conversations conducted along forgotten miles of Southern highway. After a terrible accident brings to surface their sociopathic tendencies, they become wanted men on a hallucinatory, nightmarish flight that circles cruelly back on its origin. Much as Menger tries to avoid the truth, through art and through his tendency to collect others’ experience at the expense of his own, he will ultimately come face-to-face with his own, incontrovertible essence. Character is destiny and destiny is unavoidable. By the lights of sewing machines and motel fires, on the screens of unplugged televisions that display mysterious shows, Menger begins to discern the truth behind his own elaborately constructed mythology and the arsonist’s secret identity.
Elliptical, unsettling and strangely fascinating.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101413-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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