Finally, this effort is sometimes moving or amusing, but also irritating and ultimately disappointing.
As in The World According to Garp, a young man is trying to find his way as he grows up amid institutional, individual, familial, and social craziness in upper New England.
An orphan whose adoptions never stick, Homer Wells keeps returning to the institution in remote St. Cloud's, Maine, that is presided over by its elderly founder, ascetic Dr. Wilbur Larch, committed and expert obstetrician and abortionist (as well as ether addict). Dr. Latch's creed is to give people what they want: an orphan or an abortion. He and his aging female staff count on Homer to grow up to succeed Larch in "the Lord's work" of providing abortions in this pre-World War II world; but while Homer is an accomplished apprentice, his principles are resolutely pro-life. At 20, he leaves the orphanage to live with a wealthy family of coastal apple-growers, whose son and future daughter-in-law are the Golden Delicious variety and become his closest friends. Homer becomes expert at the business, which involves sorting marketable perfect apples from the bruised ones good only for the cider press. But with the apples comes temptation, leading to problems with the rules of love, a not-quite Jules-et-Jim-like solution, and an ultimate crisis that brings the book to a resounding, but awfully pat, resolution. As with Garp, Irving is not afraid of sentiment—and here knows how to stir the emotions in skillful depictions of parental love, unwanted orphans, Alzheimer-stricken adults, and distraught women desperate for a D&C. Even in scenes of appalling horror, Irving can be very funny—he shows obvious indebtedness to Dickens—but there is a less savory element in the way he presents some of his pathetic characters—especially females—as titillating freaks. And the cranking out of the less-than-gripping plot is made palatable largely by episodic situations involving the more vivid minor characters. Most seriously, despite echoes of the clearly "significant" title throughout, it is not at all clear what exactly is the novel's point.
Finally, this effort is sometimes moving or amusing, but also irritating and ultimately disappointing.Pub Date: June 17, 1985
ISBN: 0679603352
Page Count: 571
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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