Self-consciously elegiac while emotionally distant.
The dissolution of paradise is the theme of this novella about a community of youthful free spirits who mature into more settled conventionality and eventually fall back into the very patterns they were trying to avoid.
In the 1970s, young people dropping out of college or careers find themselves in Ferris, a northern California beach town. Since many are trying to escape their parents’ conventional expectations and their personal histories, they make living in the present moment their goal. Taking undemanding jobs, they spend their free time hanging out, banding together in a loose countercultural tribe. Naturally, romances spring up. Energetic Randy, who works with senior citizens, ends up with Alma, an earth-mother type. After his first girlfriend, Annie, dumps him, college dropout Graham turns to efficient, lively Darla. Both couples, like most of their community, marry and have kids. They start to create real homes, which require earning real money. Into the ’80s, the sense of communality lingers as Ferris gentrifies. Then at a tribe campfire on the beach, unexpected passion ignites between Randy and Darla. Along with physical attraction, the two share ambitions and a sense of entitlement that Alma and Graham lack. The affair goes on for years until their children are in their early teens, when Alma discovers the truth. After their subsequent divorces, Randy marries Darla and enters politics. Alma and Graham fade from view. Ferris becomes another sprawling bedroom suburb. Frank (Boys Keep Being Born, 2001, etc.) uses a narrator slightly removed from events. The reader learns only midway through that Annie is telling the story, piecing it together from letters she received after leaving Ferris. While imagining a past she did not witness, she implies rather than raises interesting questions about the seeds of the tribe’s failure. The individual characters remain sketches—even Graham, whom Annie presumably knew well.
Self-consciously elegiac while emotionally distant.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-57962-148-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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