If all novels were this good, Americans would read more.
A small masterpiece of black comedy and suspense about a trio of backwoods heroes who embark upon a modern-day quest.
Covering 24 hours, set in small-town Vermont, the novel begins and ends with a certain New England ennui, but what fills the in-between is an absorbing tale of toppling the giant of the woods. The day begins with Lillian sitting in her car, a paring knife in her lap, her dead cat in the passenger seat. Waiting for the sheriff, she wants to lodge a complaint against Blackway, a notorious thug who has been stalking her, and most recently offed fluffy Annabelle. Sheriff Wingate says he can’t help without proof (he’s strictly by the book), but maybe she should talk to some men at the old mill to see what they can do. Mill owner Whizzer sends Lillian off with Nate the Great, a large young man with more brawn than brains, and Lester Speed, an old-timer whose bag full of tricks will resolve Lillian’s problems. While the three track down their man (against Nate’s steady refrain: “I ain’t afraid of Blackway” and Lester’s vague plan to defeat a notorious outlaw), Whizzer and his gang of loafers sit in the mill office (one suspects this is a daily occurrence) and drink beer, philosophize and fill in some of the backstory about Lillian, Lester and Nate. Whizzer and the boys are beautifully nuanced, familiar and original, as they happily pontificate about nothing much. Meanwhile, our heroes, a few steps behind Blackway, find themselves at a trashy motel, in a windowless bar (where a man loses an ear thanks to Lester’s quick wrist) and finally in a forest, where they plan to confront Blackway at his converted bus. His novel a loose rendering of a King Arthur tale, Freeman (My Life and Adventures, 2002, etc.) builds a sense of otherworldly menace around Blackway, part petty-crook, part bogeyman. It seems all but impossible that an unarmed woman, a hulking youth and a limping old man could slay this beast.
If all novels were this good, Americans would read more.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58642-139-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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