An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.
A young graduate meditates on his future and agonizes over his absent girlfriend during a long hot summer in St. Louis.
Debut novelist Beachy finds his voice but loses his narrative in the ethereal Midwestern landscape of this coming-of-age fable. The novel is narrated by Potter Mays, a character who falls somewhere between Charles Webb’s Ben Braddock and John Updike’s Rabbit Anstrom on the maturity scale and shares many of their tentative propensities. After graduating from college, Potter returns to his childhood home in suburban Missouri to lick his wounds. After he cheated on his girlfriend Audrey with a disposable blonde, and she cheated on him with a “dirty hippie,” Potter’s first love has left for an extended tour of Europe with bisexual beauty Carmel, posting cryptic notes and mementos for our tortured host. Back in the ’burbs, Potter makes a pretense at normality with a menial job delivering water and falls back into the comfortable routines of life among his parents and the transitional misadventures that arise among stranded high-school friends. The advice delivered onto the oddly detached Potter ranges from ironic (“What happens is you get to a point where you have to let the past go,” says Potter’s father, confessing his impending divorce) to bitingly straightforward (“Be a grown-up for once, Potter,” says best friend Stuart Hurst, having sold his advice to his amigo as an “Independent Thought Contractor”). Beachy’s perception of the doldrums of young adulthood are sound enough but his affected literary style often falls flat, especially when Potter bends so often to navel-gazing inaction. “But what of the aberrations? We half-mirror sons, smudged, foreign. These deviations from values. We who survived only to tarnish the men we admire. We failures, broken models,” muses Potter during one memorable aside at a Cardinals game. Potter makes for an interesting deviant but not a very lucid one.
An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34185-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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