Contemplative and complex.
A messy meditation on life in the face of death from the author of The Invaders (2015).
Evelyn is waiting for her parents to die—not looking forward to it but preoccupied with this inevitability for which she does not know how to prepare. She’s also waiting for her marriage to die; she’s given up, but she wants her husband, Bobby, to be the one who asks for a divorce. While she waits for both of these endings, she checks out temporarily by taking long drives around Los Angeles, drinking wine, and hitting her weed pen. She’s searching the web for a grief support group when she finds a program that teaches people how to help the terminally ill die. Training for this task compels Evelyn to think deeply about her own life, as does preparing her clients for death. One of the pleasures of this book is that these experiences do not lead to dramatic revelations. The shifts in Evelyn’s thoughts and behavior are subtle and slow. She never makes an explicit connection between her work as a death doula and her decision to finally leave Bobby, but she begins to take practical steps toward that end. Indeed, the process that Evelyn devises to leave her marriage is similar to the process she uses to ease clients toward their final exits. And both processes are morally, ethically, and emotionally fraught. This is not an action-packed novel, and the narrative moves at a meditative pace. What makes it engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition. Evelyn is self-aware enough to understand her despair and resilient enough to not succumb to it entirely. This does not mean that she has any idea what she should do in order to feel contented and fulfilled—and it’s not that she hasn’t tried. In a passage in which Evelyn is trying to get her doctor to increase her prescription for a sedative, she considers all the therapists she's sought help from. The obstacle between Evelyn and happiness is not a grand tragedy; it is the accumulated weight of the small tragedies we all endure and carry with us.
Contemplative and complex.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-18695-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
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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