Somewhat limp and intermittently exceedingly arch. But a case can be made for listing the book among the most amusing...
There’s something to offend everybody and entertain many in this engagingly subversive novel from the resolutely quirky author (Ambivalent Zen, 1996, etc.).
In a bizarre near-future narrative accompanied by dozens of faux-scholarly footnotes, critically acclaimed author Walker Linchak (best known for his series “The Completes” —e.g., The Complete Book of 9/11) describes the experience that makes him a cultural icon. Awakening one morning, he discovers that a substantial crust has materialized inside his right nostril. Thus is a new search for information and meaning initiated, as Walker—like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, adjusting to insecthood—undertakes to analyze the phenomenology of Nasalism: i.e., nose-picking. Both Walker’s accomplished wife Sara and his brother Mickey (a condescending psychoanalyst) assume he’s nuts. Yet the world of cyberspace opens its virtual arms to Walker’s musings about a habit that’s lauded as principled self-exploration and ridiculed as masturbatory. Our author’s “nasal blogs” stimulate widespread interest and enviable fame. Sara’s hesitant adoption of the practice becomes surprisingly sexually arousing. And Walker’s former Yale roommate, unemployed President George W. Bush, becomes an enthusiastic acolyte, appearing on Larry King Live and emotionally endorsing a “bad habit” now being recognized as a candid admission of the human need to relax, do what feels good and not feel bad about it. It’s difficult to imagine a satisfactory resolution for this defiantly eccentric fiction’s dippy premise, and Shainberg settles for a flatly unconvincing open ending. Still, the poker-faced parodies of scientific methodology and Internet self-importance are fun (it’s about time somebody lampooned Wikipedia), and it’s oddly ingratiating to hear soon-to-be-ex-President Bush enumerating his own failings rather than leaving the job to amateurs of all persuasions.
Somewhat limp and intermittently exceedingly arch. But a case can be made for listing the book among the most amusing fiction picks for fall.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9763895-8-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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