Nordan (Wolf Whistle, 1993, etc.) boldly goes where his betters (Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor) have gone before. And he holds his own, mixing dark humor, Dixie eccentricity, and old-time redemption. As always, Nordon returns to his Macondo on the Mississippi Delta, Arrow Catcher, Miss., a small southern town where the undertaker recites Shakespeare, good old boys hum Rossini, and the tall tales grow like kudzu. In this off-center, sleepy place, ``loss is important, magic too.'' Which means here that people die, but their souls live on. When two ne'er-do-well out-of-towners are shot dead at William Tell's general store, everyone assumes it's the work of Morgan, the Texas-trained sharpshooter who was raised by the local hoodoo woman. But Louis McNaughton, a fat kid with a comic-book-fueled imagination, saw the real shooter: the none-too- right-in-the-head Hydro Raney, a hypoencephalic boy-man who lives with his loving father at their isolated fishing camp. One night while tending William Tell's store in town, he manages to kill before being killed, but he can't sort out the difference, so further tragedy ensues. All the grief and gore catches the town at a moment when everyone seems to be seeking forgiveness and transformation. The cuckolding Mrs. McNaughton shames herself into sobriety and a resumption of her motherly instincts; the ``Prince of Darkness'' (aka the local undertaker) tries to reconnect with the world after the death of his overbearing mother; and Leonard Reel, a self-loathing homosexual given to public confessions of his sordid encounters, finally comes to terms with his sexuality. Sad Mr. Raney, widowed by Hydro's birth, finds comfort in his visions of an afterlife where mother and son reunite in Heaven's blues bar, with Robert Johnson playing on stage and Jesus serving Buds. Nordan nicely balances his raw subjects and over-the-top characters with an appealing sweetness and decency. State-of-the- art southern fiction. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-083-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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