Individually, the 18 dark and ominous stories collected here are impressive: in each one, the smooth surface of an ordinary life is disrupted by some somber shape (like a raven's wing) that at first appears to arrive from elsewhere but soon is seen to have been buried in the life all along. But collectively, these stories are disturbing: studies in passivity and self-ignorance that amount to pathology. In the title story, Billy's pregnant wife wards off Billy's contempt and brutality by clutching a few strands of hair from a horse (named Raven's Wing) who has come to represent a chink of transcendence for Billy. In "Harrow Street at Lindon," newly married graduate students begin to imitate the cruelly manic sexual life they hear being played out by their neighbors, through thin walls; the force impelling them is faceless, anonymous, potentially deadly and is suddenly gone when the neighbors are forced to move. In the most frightening of these stories, "Testimony," the teen-aged narrator, though "quick to learn, fast as an eel," has never learned a reason why she should not abet a murder: when her "boyfriend,"who calls himself Ruby Red, picks up a stray young girl on the Atlantic City boardwalk and beats, burns, rapes and tortures her until she dies, our girl deans up the vomit, supplies him with ropes and matches, and is satisfied with her reverse identification with the girl: "I'm the only one that he respected." All of this might be interesting if it didn't come to seem obsessive and nauseating: if there were one character or social value delineated in this group of stories that could stand against or even recognize the "raven's wing" of nihilistic sexuality and death. There isn't. For Oates fans with strong stomachs.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1986
ISBN: 0525483330
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
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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