A bit of a disappointment from a talented author.
The president of an elite New England college grapples with student protest in Korelitz’s sixth novel (You Should Have Known, 2014, etc.).
Naomi Roth is Webster College’s first female president, a fitting denouement to the school’s half-century evolution from a bastion of WASP privilege to a progressive institution housing a diverse faculty and student body. Naomi, herself from an earlier generation of demonstrators, is inclined to be tolerant when a group of students camps on the Webster quad to protest the denial of tenure to popular professor Nicholas Gall. Although the students insinuate it’s because Gall is black, in fact his only published work was found to be plagiarized—but if Naomi says that, Gall could sue the college. She hopes the protestors, who include her daughter, Hannah, will soon fade away, but she hasn’t reckoned on the charisma of Omar Khayal, a student of Palestinian origins, whose soft-spoken demeanor belies his ability to inflame the situation at every turn. Korelitz has always been a deft plotter, so presumably it’s intentional that readers will figure out Omar is not what he seems long before Naomi does. She is the latest in the author’s long line of smart but blinkered female protagonists, but this time the origins of Naomi’s obtuseness remain murky, and her relationships with secondary characters like best friend Francine Rigor, Webster dean of admissions, are less fully fleshed than usual. In addition, the academic concerns that made such a vivid backdrop for the human drama of Admission (2009) here seem excessively self-referential, as does the endless wrangling about just how inclusive Webster really is. Granted, this is currently a hot topic on real-life campuses, but it needs a more compelling fictional framework. Nonetheless, Korelitz’s smooth prose and unfailing intelligence make this novel worth reading, if not quite up to her usual high standards.
A bit of a disappointment from a talented author.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9238-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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