What Haskell is describing is conditionality, which is a thrilling notion, but this only makes it more disappointing when...
Haskell’s latest book blurs the line between fact and fiction, action and meditation, telling a story or a series of stories while at the same time reflecting on what they mean.
The subject is ballet, about which Haskell is knowledgeable and astute. He builds the book around five classics—La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadère, Swan Lake, and Petrushka—using them to frame a broader narrative that takes place in contemporary Los Angeles. For Haskell, identity is a key issue (his 2009 novel, Out of My Skin, revolved around a Steve Martin impersonator who feels himself become indistinct through his imitation), and he writes deftly, meaningfully, about the fluidity of experience and the self. “You make adjustments to where you thought you were going, and who you thought you were,” his narrator, who has suffered a grievous personal loss, tells us, “and this is my direction, I thought, the direction I find myself going, and what I have to do, or what I have to be, or somehow what I am, is ahead of me.” The same, of course, is true for all of us, which is what gives his novel its urgency. And yet, as the book develops, it shifts direction, coalescing around a loosely formed plot involving gangsters and a gambling debt. It’s not hard to see what Haskell’s up to; the ballets he describes, and integrates into his text, involve betrayals, false or lost loves, the irrevocability of circumstance. Still, if melodrama is central to these dances, it is less effective on the page. The more the story turns toward the narrator’s entanglement, the more we lose sight of the larger, even existential, questions with which Haskell intends to engage. “When I said before,” he writes, “that I wanted my life to be like a dance I meant it, of course, metaphorically. You can dance sitting down. Or weaving between pedestrians on the street. Sometimes I like to get in my car and just drive, more or less mindlessly, without destination, going straight if the light is green, turning if the light is red, following the dictates of the world as manifested by the signals of the world.”
What Haskell is describing is conditionality, which is a thrilling notion, but this only makes it more disappointing when the book becomes, more or less, a conventional crime story in the end.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-787-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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