How many times can Irving, novelist-as-juggler, throw the same subjects, metaphors, and tricks—bears, motorcycles, prep schools, hotels, Vienna, muscle-building, feminism—up into the air? Five times so far, including the renowned, genuinely endearing Garp. How many times can he then catch them? Only four times, it seems—because this time, in the weakest of all his books, the juggled pieces come clattering down around Irving's feet: he has again trotted out his genial cartoon . . . but here he has left out the animation. The Berry family, up in Dairy, N.H.—where dad Win teaches at a second-rate prep school in the Fifties—also includes Mom, eldest son Frank (who's gay), earthy Franny, narrator John, dwarf sister Lilly (who'll one day write a best-selling novel), little Egg, and Sorrow the dog. When the girl's section of the school fails, Win buys it and transforms the building into the Hotel New Hampshire: he's nostalgic for summers of his youth when he bellhopped at a Maine resort that featured a refugee animal-trainer named Freud and his performing bear, State O'Maine. (There's also been a bit of bad business at the school: sister Franny was raped, a dastardliness avenged by a big black football-scholarship student named Junior Jones—a sensitive big galoomph who predictably resembles the feminist footballer in Garp.) But though the kids have fun spying (via intercom) on the doings of the few guests in the rooms, the hotel is naturally a flop; and across a diaphanous bridge of narrative Irving marches the family next to Vienna, where the Berrys will help out old Freud the bear-trainer with his hotel. This second Hotel New Hampshire, on the Krugerstrasse, is no more successful. It does have, however, ""characters"" aplenty inside: whores, an ugly girl who wears a bear suit, radicals who attempt to blow up the State Opera. And there's yet a third Hotel N.H. in the future: it will function as a Maine rapecrisis center. True, all these hotels add up to a flabby metaphor—a sort of comic imitation of Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. But what's most distressing here is Irving's sleepy narrative procedure: he sets up one or two big incidents hundreds of pages in advance, then desultorily plays with the set-ups until the blow-ups themselves come as tepid anti-climaxes. And, to fill the big chaotic spaces in between, Irving pads like crazy, picking out a few coy sermonettes here and there: ""But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not. And because that's what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear. Some people's minds are good enough so that they can live all by themselves—their minds can be their good, smart bears."" Rape, families, the fate of European Jews—nothing, for Irving, is so big that it can't be chopped down to winsome size to fit in a blender-novel like this. Garp got away with it—the comedy was more centrifugal, scarier—and much of that bestseller's readership will no doubt want to sample this retread. But many of them will be sorely disappointed . . . because nothing lives at the Hotel New Hampshire but cuteness. And this lazy, toothless novel is mostly just a bore.?
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1981
ISBN: 034541795X
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1981
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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