For McMurtry fans, there’s some heat here, but little light.
Compared to the literary feasts McMurtry has previously delivered, this is barely a snack.
The publication of Duane’s Depressed (1999) billed that novel on its jacket as “the final volume of The Last Picture Show/Texasville story.” Not so fast. Duane’s back again in a slim, slapdash volume promoted as a sequel to Duane’s Depressed, though it seems like little more than a coda to that trilogy. Duane Moore is now 64, widowed and retired. He’s still depressed, or he’s depressed again. He has just returned from a trip to Egypt when he stops by the office where he no longer really works and discovers a new employee, a young woman in a see-through blouse who keeps jabbering about her nipples. Since sex is no longer much a part of Duane’s life, he can’t tell whether he’s aroused or disturbed, or simply obsessed. He discusses the new arrival to small-town Thalia with his lifelong friends Ruth Popper and Bobby Lee, who are still snapping at each other. He also makes the woman a focus of his ongoing therapy with his lesbian psychoanalyst, Dr. Honor Carmichael, after whom he has lusted (when lust was part of his emotional range). Dr. Carmichael tells him he knows nothing about sex, and that many men who have had long marriages know little more. Duane will ultimately find his libido lifted more than once (in graphic detail for a McMurtry novel), and his spirits will lift as well. Thalia has plainly changed—the fast-food industry has fallen to Sri Lankans, which also helps perk Duane’s appetite—and he must decide whether it’s time to leave Thalia, to change with it, or to follow the old ways into the grave (where his wife and much of his past resides). He also must deal with complications concerning his two married daughters, one of whom has decided to become a nun, while the other has discovered she’s a lesbian.
For McMurtry fans, there’s some heat here, but little light.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4165-3426-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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