Gummerman's first novel (the collection We Find Ourselves in Moontown, 1989) takes on the depravity of a commercialized Americabut remains more wooden than moving. At 34, Frank Eastman faces life as a paraplegic: He was working for the phone company in Anaheim, Calif., when rats jumped at him from the palm tree he was trimming, making him fall from his ladder. Now, six months later, he returns to Anaheim (from St. Louis, where he went to recuperate at his sister's place) to visit the scent of the accidentand to let author Gummerman stir up the mix of symbols in his allegorical tale. Traveling by wheelchair, Eastman checks into the Tradewinds motel, a dreary old relic from the 1950s that's suitable because it's just a few blocks from Disneyland, which Eastman claims he's eager to visit. His actual tour of the theme park, however, is perfunctory, allowing him, back at the motel, to get more involved in the affairs of the obese and inscrutable woman there who sells drugs to a trickle of customersincluding the homeless and dreadlocked ``Earthling,'' a thief who later breaks into Eastman's room and threatens him with rape. The woman sends Eastmanfor no really clear reasonto see the local drug kingpin known as ``Emperor,'' actually a slick young Asian manipulator named Jarvis, who treats Eastman to a long Grand Inquisitor-style monologue justifying his own criminality by placing the seeds of it in US policies in the Pacific up to Hiroshima. At end, on a bad acid-trip, Eastman will be rescuedand then abandoned at roadsideby the guitar-playing girl he met earlier at the airport and by her brother, the realtor, opportunist, and quintessential scumbag of marketing named Chance Slimp. A cry of outrage at economics-driven cruelty, rapine, and insensitivity in America; but with characters more thematically hyper-correct than felt naturally on the pulse.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43991-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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