curiously dispassionate southern family history is as generic as they come.
A first novel by poet Zuber is a wistful, postdiluvian tale of southern rural longing without the rich, creeping detail that might make it worth the while of readers of Faulkner and McCullers.
In true romance fashion, Roland Bayley, whose mother was a longtime, well-loved inhabitant of Faith, North Carolina, returns with his young family in 1932 to discover mysterious, undelivered love letters to her written decades before. Who was Anna Stockton Bayley, a woman who abandoned her dreams of learning about the wider world when impregnated, in 1897, by the brutish, twice-widowed farmer John Bayley, and settled into farm life in Faith a half century before to raise Roland and his passel of siblings? The backstory that ensues feels listless because obligatory, as well as tedious in its familiarity: a poor, young, strong-working, rosy-faced girl is hired as a servant by the wealthy Alba family in a neighboring town, where Anna learns about music and culture and is even proposed to by the son of her employer. Eventually, she’s spotted by a stern, hard-drinking, ambitious widower who resolves to change his life if Anna will marry him—and even if she says no (“There're things I want to know about”), she has to because she's carrying his baby. And so it goes through the years: the babies who come one after the other, the accretion by John of land or property or wealth, and the gradual wearying away of love and need between the two. Even Anna's one moment of rebellion (a three-day affair in middle-age with a man she meets on a train) arrives too late to summon any needed vitality into this plainspoken, salt-of -the-earth, no-surprises narrative. A novel’s worth is in the details, Flaubert might say, and Zuber's
curiously dispassionate southern family history is as generic as they come.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28133-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
