In Canty’s fiction (Into the Great Wide Open, 1996; A Stranger in This World, 1994), the irrational has a way of winning out. His tough, resilient, often bitter characters know better, but at life’s turning points they surrender almost inevitably to the yearning for self-destruction. This is the case again here. Set mostly in a small Montana town, an economic backwater haunted by the ghosts of the old, supposedly free West, the story follows the downward spiral of Marvin Deernose, a bright, sardonic Native American who allows himself to be caught up in the tormented interactions of a wealthy white family. Everything begins when Marvin, on a bitterly cold morning, stumbles on an accident and saves an old man’s life. The man, Senator Henry Neihart, survives the accident, thanks to Marvin, only to discover that he’s mortally ill. Justine, his deeply troubled granddaughter, comes home, ostensibly to tend him. In fact, though, she’s fleeing horrors of her own: her four-year-old son has been killed in an automobile accident, for which she holds her husband responsible. Already damaged, Justine is drawn by her son’s death to the edge of insanity. It’s a tribute to the power of Canty’s deterministic vision that, even though it seems inevitable that the angry, desperate Justine and the despairing, self-aware Marvin (struggling to control his appetite for booze and drugs) will meet and begin an affair, their collision is still striking. Canty also portrays’shrewdly—the anger the affair rouses in Marvin’s town. And the outcome of Justine and Marvin’s coupling, while unsurprising, has real power. Canty is, in fact, one of the most deterministic of American novelists since Frank Norris: in his world, things are almost always skewed by our wayward desires. Yet his convictions don—t get in the way of a full and moving depiction of character. A sad, gripping novel, driven by a harsh and distinctive vision of life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49160-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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