For all its metafictional winks and high-jinks, Barth's latest tome fails to transcend its (ironically intended) self-description as "a novel in which next to nothing happens beyond an interminably pregnant couple's swapping stories." No ordinary couple, Peter and Katherine Sagamore are "the favored of the fucking earth" and their storytelling is of course meant to be extraordinary as well. With Katherine ready to pop, this golden duo cruise the Chesapeake Bay under sail, and without benefit of motor. Almost 40, librarian Katherine, who's also founder of the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling (ASPS), hopes to bring her writer-husband out of his long slump. Celebrated for his early books, he's written himself into a minimalist dead-end; his latest stories consist of nothing but their one-word titles. "Sailing whither listeth wind and tide," these children of the Eastern Shore—his background's prole, hers horsy—recount their personal histories, with emphasis on the sordid stuff, such as Katherine's anal rape by her first husband, himself a repressed homosexual congressman. Before Katherine's water breaks, she and Peter meet up with some unlikely fellow travellers: a Greek couple who fancy themselves—and seem to be—Odysseus and Nausicaa; a salty seaman named Don Quicksoat; and a former CIA agent and his literature-prof wife who drift in from Barth's last novel, Sabbatical, and recycle some of its complex spy plot. This "narrative scavenger hunt" also includes long digressions on the "stars" by which both Barth and Peter steer: Twain, Cervantes, and Homer. Katherine's lesbian friend, and former lover, May Jump, hops aboard to update us on Scheherazade, another inspiration for these interminable "tidewater tales." "Et cetera" (to quote Barth's favored tag here). Rudderless fiction that runs aground too often.
Pub Date: June 22, 1987
ISBN: 080185556X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
IN THE NEWS
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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