Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.
Vancouver-based Maillard returns to West Virginia, where he was born and bred, in this finely rendered account of a young man stranded in a hardscrabble mill town.
Raysburg (the setting of Maillard’s previous trilogy: Gloria, 2000, etc.) was a gritty place in the best of times—and the best of times were long over by 1969, when Jimmy Koprowski returned from the Army. He’d never got beyond Guam, where he repaired B-52s, so he’s not one of your shell-shocked Vietnam vets, then, but he’s still got problems. The steel mill in Rayburn closed down years ago and there’s little for an ambitious young man to do. Jimmy gets a job repairing TVs, but what he really wants is to head out to Texas for work in the burgeoning aeronautics industry. It’s not so easy to get away, though. Even if he had the cash to float himself for a few months (which he hasn’t), he would feel held back by the presence of Old Bullet Head (his father), his kid sister Linda, and his friends from the neighborhood (most as aimless as he is). And, just as Jimmy is finally working up the nerve to break loose, a further complication develops in the person of Connie, a wealthy married woman from the other side of town. Jimmy and she begin a torrid, obsessive affair (as for how obsessive, they often have to resort to makeshift venues like the back of Jimmy’s car for their trysts). Like many men in his stymied position, Jimmy is also drinking too much—way too much. But there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, being shone by Janice Dluwiecki. A friend of his sister’s, Janice starts out as an annoyance to Jimmy, but the two eventually fall in love. Can he get rid of Connie, stop drinking, and get on with his life?
Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30889-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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