Beautifully done. Bender has a remarkable gift for showing how the security of family interrelationship warms, chafes,...
The audience awaiting Oprah's picks will want to know about this highly touted first novel about three generations of women in a painfully bonded southern California family.
The story’s central actions occur on a single day, when middle-aged Marlene (`Lena`), a retarded adult who has matter-of-factly set a fire in her room in a residential home,` escapes` to a nearby beach for a day's outing with her 12-year-old niece Shelley. It's left (as it has so often been) to Lena's widowed mother, Ella Rose, to clean up the mess and make the apologies—and to take refuge in extended memories of her own girlhood (as part of a Russian-American Boston-area family), marriage, and embattled motherhood, attempting to raise, and keep peace between, the unpredictable Lena and Lena's younger sister (Shelley's mother) Vivien. These comprise a heartbreaking story of loneliness assuaged by Ella's happy marriage (to Lou, a gentle shoe-store owner who genuinely adores her), then replaced by a deeper sorrow as Ella accepts the burdens of managing Lena's fragile emotional life, even steering her through marriage (to the likewise retarded Bob), then being there—forever, if necessary, and bereft of her own comforts, as caring for Lena pulls Ella ever further away from the others she loves. With perfect pacing and tact, Bender shows us how the `games` Lena plays with the fascinated Shelley (a Carson McCullers–derived waif, much too thinly drawn) ironically recapitulate the disillusionments both Lena and Ella have suffered, in their efforts to be `like normal people.` The characterization of Lena is superb: she has more than enough intelligence to understand how `different` she is, be grateful and grieve for having loved Bob and then lost him, and realize how much of `normal` life will remain always beyond her reach.
Beautifully done. Bender has a remarkable gift for showing how the security of family interrelationship warms, chafes, imprisons, and ultimately liberates.Pub Date: April 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-94515-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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