A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is...
Shrewd study of four Sex and the City wannabes.
This is a deceptively breezy account of four women whose lives occasionally intersect through the men they know. The therapist for two of them is the uncle of a third; one of them has a brother who wants a job with two of the others; still another ends up married to the man who has starred in one’s political documentary. The novel is episodic, driven by family drama, sexual frustration and drunken tirades at glamorous parties. Despite being organized around fairly momentous events, it is most successful as a character study. The women at its center are relatively talented, relatively successful, relatively young urban hipsters seeking something or someone emotionally powerful enough to overcome their studied irony. Although we’ve seen these anxious, rudderless types before, Lindstrom is unafraid to push them to their limits. Unpleasant characters, for example, don’t learn a lesson about themselves and become chastened; they remain unpleasant even though they become more sympathetic. A talented documentary maker and a driven film producer don’t change the world; they become successful by deciding that personal integrity need never trouble their professional lives. Lindstrom’s great strength is her acerbic, yet strangely affecting understanding that the compromises people make with their ideals tell us more about them than the ideals themselves. The author moves sure-footedly between the stories of the women, but by the end, two of them emerge as the primary characters. In the case of these two especially, Lindstrom creates wonderfully rich personalities and quite distinct and distinctive patterns of speech and thought.
A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is fresh and its insights into the aging-hipster-turned-ambitious-careerwoman are both biting and poignant.Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-232-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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