A quietly competent collection. The fragments do connect to form a larger whole, but one without great intensity or momentum.
Eleven interlocking but self-sustaining stories (several previously published) shape an earnest debut from psychotherapist Kobin about a family of four that struggles with, and prevails against, adversities ranging from divorce and remarriage to career sea changes.
Harriet and Phillip are the parents of Matina and younger Eric. Phillip is a dutiful son living mostly in his father’s shadow on Long Island as an executive in the family wallpaper business, but his father’s death (“Rain”) exposes faultlines in his marriage that are quick to widen. As an earlier story (“What I Learned from Clara”) shows, Harriet loves to dance and isn’t one to avoid a flirtation, not even when it leads to an outright affair while Phillip is away on business, after he’s moved with wife and kids far from his parents and started fresh. Eventually, Phillip remarries, to the much younger Marianne, and accordingly suffers hostility from Matina (“His Mother, His Daughter”), but it’s the desperation in his new wife’s attitude after a time of unsuccessful attempts to have their own child that really wears him down (“Woman Made of Sand”). While Harriet has found a new career in waste management and begun a relationship with a music professor who likes to dance, brainy Matina has entered medical school and continued a part-time career as a model (“Madonna at Monterchi”). And Eric reaches the pinnacle of his own short-lived dancing career while performing in a Prokoviev ballet for his entire family—including Phillip, Marianne, and their new baby (“Discipline and Will”).
A quietly competent collection. The fragments do connect to form a larger whole, but one without great intensity or momentum.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-883285-23-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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