“You can’t write about sex,” maintains the narrative, an assertion the novel corroborates.
This novel about the sexual revolution is ultimately something of a tease, with far more talking and reading, and talking about reading, than consummation.
Though Amis (House of Meetings, 2007, etc.) has long been acknowledged as the foremost disciple of Saul Bellow in contemporary British literature, the opening chapters of his latest read more like lubricious Philip Roth. The year is 1970, the protagonist is 20-year-old Keith Nearing and the setting is a castle in the Italian mountains, where the normal rules—if there are still any normal rules—concerning sexual propriety can be suspended. The protagonist is the same generation, height and nationality as the author, who at one point assures the reader that “the summer in Italy wasn’t art, it was only life. No one made anything up. All this really happened.” What happened? Not much, though the summer apparently had lasting repercussions for the protagonist, with the narrative offering a series of present-day interludes that invoke his multiple marriages and daughters. In 1970, among those with whom Keith shares the Italian castle are three women. The one who reduces him to drooling obsession is Scheherazade, a male fantasy (satiric? ironic?) of a voluptuary who is “oozing out all over,” has yet to realize her power over men and is suffering from sexual frustration. As the literary-minded Keith muses, “According to an English novel he had read, men understood why they liked women’s breasts—but they didn’t understand why they liked them so much.” Then there’s Gloria Beautyman, whose posterior is as riveting as Scheherazade’s bust, and who appears even more available. Hardly standing a chance amid those competing attractions is Lily (one of the many flower-named females in the novel), Keith’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, with whom sex is perfunctory. Amid this “erotically decisive summer,” the reader’s frustration becomes almost as great as Keith’s, as extended discourses on literature, life and religion lead to little resolution, literary or otherwise.
“You can’t write about sex,” maintains the narrative, an assertion the novel corroborates.Pub Date: May 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4452-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
IN THE NEWS
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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