A visceral novel that explores many different lusts and cultures.
In Cook’s (Massage and the Writer, 2014, etc.) wide-ranging novel, an intellectual travels the globe in the company of his desires.
Isham, the book’s protagonist, travels across continents and through cities such as Beijing; Chicago; Varanasi, India; and Marburg, Germany. He’s always pursuing his twin interests: the life of the mind and the life of the flesh. To those ends, he goes to various universities, pilgrimage sites and even the Great Wall of China, accompanied by a rotating cast of women. His musings on one of them, a voluptuous Chinese woman named Adalat, nicknamed “Cookie,” begin and end the novel. Cook offers dreamlike scenes of Isham’s relationship with her, interpolated by Isham’s romps with other women—chief among them the sexually obsessed Luna. Isham sees artistic and philosophical resonance in all of the events of his life, such as when he equates the sensual draw of Luna with the actions of the Archangel Gabriel: “Erotic intelligence is the capacity to captivate, even entrap, a person sexually, without the application of force….Gabriel was able to accomplish this in the Annunciation with a robe and a few key gestures.” Isham proceeds to various locations around the world, followed by students’ allegations of sexual harassment and pervasive memories of his earlier life; soon, the story oscillates between different times and places. Ultimately, the novel ends where it began in Beijing, but Isham himself is completely changed. Cook writes in a style that will appeal to readers who like their texts thick with allusion and their narrators unreliable. However, despite this style, the text is never difficult to follow. Cook provides readers with a strong sense of place; even when the narrative transitions are swift, he always makes clear exactly where his characters are. In Isham, the author offers a character that is, by turns, endearing and frustrating, and this makes him a thoroughly realistic human being.
A visceral novel that explores many different lusts and cultures.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479230525
Page Count: 230
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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