A likable if uneven tale of discovering yourself in old age.
From Maloy (A Stone Bridge North: Reflections on a New Life, 2002), an earnest novel about a septuagenarian finding a second life after the death of her husband.
Sarah and Charles are enjoying old age. Things aren’t implausibly perfect—Sarah has a contentious relationship with daughter Charlotte, and Charles can’t connect with son David—but they have a rich life in their native Vermont, with friends and fulfilling pursuits. The first third of the story follows Sarah and Charles as they conduct daily business, with Sarah reminiscing about their long and mostly happy marriage. This may sound like dull stuff, but this is the best of the novel, a striking portrait of a marriage that is as imperfect and amiable as its participants. Then one day Charles has an accident while hiking, and dies shortly thereafter from his injuries. Sarah mourns but soon her new, entirely unplanned life begins. Mordechai (her friend’s Israeli cousin) moves into a small cabin on her property to write his book. Then teenage granddaughter Lottie moves in because she simply can’t bear another day with her parents. After that, Sarah allows a few of Lottie’s friends, similarly rebelling, to live in the large house too. It vaguely reminds Sarah of her Depression childhood home, peopled with her extended family, a poor but companionable bunch. Then Sandy and her five-year-old, Tyler, move in (their trailer burned down) and then Josie, who ran away from her abusive husband with her infant son. Sarah’s son David quips that his childhood home has been turned into a commune, and there is certainly that feeling of camaraderie among the unlikely roommates. Sarah takes up photography and meditation and attempts to mend her relationship with Charlotte before it’s too late. Though the latter half of the novel is filled with people and their various stories, its heart is back at the beginning with Sarah and Charles. All that follows feels a bit predictable.
A likable if uneven tale of discovering yourself in old age.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-541-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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