Irreverent humor doesn't compensate for insubstantial characters, nor does some mildly endearing self-deprecation redeem...
A bumbling antihero struggles for a little peace and quiet in the dystopian near future imagined by Knipfel (Noogie’s Time to Shine, 2007, etc.).
Following “the Horribleness,” a mysterious attack in Tupelo, Miss., which has been used by the government as an excuse to wage a pointless war, citizens live under constant surveillance and the fear of being branded as potential terrorists. Corporatization has invaded everything, including (thanks to implants) the skulls of all good citizens. Personal communication devices called “VidLogs” are “more mandatory than pants.” A run-in with a member of the Stroller Brigade, an organization of sadistic mothers who bully childless citizens with razorblade-fitted perambulators, lands Wally on the wrong side of the law. He’s had enough: his loveless marriage, the constant commercials blaring inside his head, the nosy neighbors bent on ratting out nonconformists to the authorities—they all combine to drive Wally to attempt the unthinkable. He removes the implanted chip designed to make him a good citizen, rendering himself for all practical purposes invisible. Through a series of strange coincidences, Wally meets an entrancing hippie and a wisecracking dissident cowboy; they introduce him to a band of subterranean Luddites with designs on taking the world back to simpler, pretechnological, preauthoritarian times. But are the revolutionaries what they claim? Is their work that of true patriots or the criminally insane? Like Wally, readers are constantly befuddled by a surreal landscape, a cartoonish cast and a catalog of corny acronyms: SUCKIE (Single Universe Citizen Identification) cards, “SMEG/MA” (Salacious Materials Enforcement Group Metropolitan Area), etc. Thinly veiled allegories for 9/11, the Patriot Act and other contemporary phenomena bludgeon rather than enlighten. Wally and his merry band of “Unpluggers” drift in an amalgamation of themes borrowed from Orwell, Vonnegut and other masters of dystopian literature toward the inevitably cynical conclusion.
Irreverent humor doesn't compensate for insubstantial characters, nor does some mildly endearing self-deprecation redeem this satire's aimlessness and lack of engagement.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9284-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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
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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