Focusing on the overwhelming question Olivia asks her Harley Street therapist—“What’s wrong with loving someone for life?...
An Irish boy’s death continues to haunt his family circle for 40 years in Hart’s elliptical, chimerical tale.
Like most of their compatriots in a country torn by dissension and shrunken by emigration, Tom and Sissy O’Hara have never had an easy time of it. But nothing in their lives has prepared them for the way their world shivers and contracts on the June day in 1962 when their son is killed in an accident. From that moment on, the couple’s principal business is survival. It’s a job they share with their daughter Olivia—second son Daragh is no more than a wraithlike walk-on—and, curiously, with Thomas Middlehoff, a German neighbor who’s settled in Leinster to retreat from his homeland and write on literary subjects. Beginning with Middlehoff, Hart (The Reconstructionist, 2001, etc.) presents narratives from his point of view, Olivia’s and Sissy’s. Despite Tom O’Hara’s heart-rending devotion to his wife, she sinks so deep in despondency that she’s eventually hospitalized, splintering her family and provoking Olivia’s resentment. Middlehoff, a sober widower of surprisingly delicate sensibility who clings to his own mistress as if to a life raft, is drawn closer to the family when Tom asks if he can buy an ornamental gate his son had admired. But it’s Olivia’s perspective that’s the most surprising. Years after her mother returns home, having “slipped behind the event and gone back to who she was before,” Olivia, now a highly regarded actress (“I stumbled into acting. It happens”), spins a skein of reminiscences that increasingly drift toward a chronicle of Ireland’s purgatorial generation of bombings, crackdowns, hunger strikes and tentative accords, blurring the line between her fierce, undying love for her brother and her equally troubled love for her country.
Focusing on the overwhelming question Olivia asks her Harley Street therapist—“What’s wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they are dead?”—Hart produces her least mannered, most moving novel to date.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27261-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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