An offbeat and Pynchonesque debut, with some genuinely funny moments—and some freakishly aberrant ones.
A comic novel of paranoia, misdirection and suicide.
Museum curator Jim Rath has gone beyond eccentricity in his displays at the Colorado Springs Center for Gender and Power. He gets canned for including “a meticulously reproduced menstrual rag” in his exhibition on pioneering birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, though Rath feels he’s merely “pushed the conventions of sociopolitical diorama design to the brink of acceptance.” His personal life is falling apart as well; wife Jean has grown tired of his comics collection (he uses white gloves to handle the mint-condition items and surgical tweezers to turn the pages), not to mention his loopy plans for a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Evolution. Rath has become obsessed with water, which he believes harbors “a lost civilization” that he named Nautika after first glimpsing its wonders in the pool of the Colorado Springs Hilton. At a minimum he’s convinced himself that he’s found a Nautikon, an inhabitant of this magical world, replete with gills. Believing it to be the genetic residue of a race of aquatic apes, he follows the putative Nautikon, who turns out to be Les Diaz, a Department of Homeland Security agent almost as bizarre and insecure as Rath himself. Rath begins to stalk Diaz, eventually dogging him to a superannuated water park. Along the way we’re treated to the outlandish mythology of Nautika, including the Fish Girl Labiaxa, who eventually reunites with her mother the queen. Jean has perhaps the sharpest, most scathing perception of her husband. “She says I live in a diving bell where the real world can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Rath tells us. That about sums it up.
An offbeat and Pynchonesque debut, with some genuinely funny moments—and some freakishly aberrant ones.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8702-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 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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