Boldly cruel and consummately styled, these tales never fail to provoke if not always to satisfy.
Twelve new stories from a prolific master of the short form.
In Oates’ new collection, the zero-sum game so often at work in relationships is explored with exhaustive care. These relationships take varied forms. Sometimes characters struggle with power dynamics. In “Lovesick,” E___ seeks out her former lover to tell him she is being threatened by an anonymous caller, a fact that seems to shock and gratify him in equal turns. In other stories, the relationships are well worn, long settled in their more-or-less predictable gender roles, which have become insufficient to clothe the hostilities that exist at their cores. The lengthy central story, “The Suicide,” stuns with the relentless misogyny of the main character, a brilliant writer consumed by suicidal ideation, who’s disgusted by the “bottomless tar pit of [his wife’s] compassion” even as he reveals that this slavish compassion is the only emotion he has allowed her to express. Indeed, in many of the stories, the power that is transferred between characters centers around a perversion of the expression of female nurture. In “The Cold,” a mother of young children who has suffered a recent miscarriage is prevented from recovery by the presence of frigid breezes that creep up behind her like “an unwanted caress.” As bound as these characters are by their knotted relationships, they are even more bound by the taut, efficient sentences that throttle any hope a character might have of resolving their intractable dilemmas. Indeed, throughout the collection, Oates’ vicious incisiveness enacts a more brutal persecution than any of the cruelties the characters inflict upon each other—ultimately leaving little room for change in any direction other than the downward spiral. While this makes for a heady reading experience, it also creates a certain thinness to the collection as a whole that results in individual stories feeling like experiments with a theme rather than explorations of the unlikely, but still human, extremes to which the characters are forced.
Boldly cruel and consummately styled, these tales never fail to provoke if not always to satisfy.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780593535868
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.
When you deal with the darkness, everything has a price.
“Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.” Adeline tried to heed this warning, but she was desperate to escape a wedding she didn’t want and a life spent trapped in a small town. So desperate that she didn’t notice the sun going down. And so she made a deal: For freedom, and time, she will surrender her soul when she no longer wants to live. But freedom came at a cost. Adeline didn’t want to belong to anyone; now she is forgotten every time she slips out of sight. She has spent 300 years living like a ghost, unable even to speak her own name. She has affairs with both men and women, but she can never have a comfortable intimacy built over time—only the giddy rush of a first meeting, over and over again. So when she meets a boy who, impossibly, remembers her, she can’t walk away. What Addie doesn’t know is why Henry is the first person in 300 years who can remember her. Or why Henry finds her as compelling as she finds him. And, of course, she doesn’t know how the devil she made a deal with will react if he learns that the rules of their 300-year-long game have changed. This spellbinding story unspools in multiple timelines as Addie moves through history, learning the rules of her curse and the whims of her captor. Meanwhile, both Addie and the reader get to know Henry and understand what sets him apart. This is the kind of book you stay up all night reading—rich and satisfying and strange and impeccably crafted.
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8756-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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