For those who appreciate the joys of a vicarious bender and the satisfaction of watching creepy people decompensate.
A reckless, self-destructive young woman returns home to sunny Southern California after being cut loose by the boss she’s sleeping with.
Meet Elsa (also Susanna and Ingrid, depending on which one-night stand she’s introducing herself to), a beautiful loser on a dangerous tear. “It’s just past breakfast so I order up a pitcher of Bloody Marys and a bagel.…I shower with my drink and take one of Mother’s Vicodins. Let it begin, I think, rolling myself into one of the hotel bathrobes, the fabric soft and vibrantly white, wonderfully impersonal. Let it begin.” Elsa was given a cushy severance package when she was let go by the Museum of Modern Art, where she had been having an affair with her boss, a top curator, for two years, since the night he learned his son had been killed in Afghanistan. Nice. Now she’s flown to Bakersfield, stolen all her mother’s medications, and is holed up in a swanky hotel in Los Angeles while she reconnects with her old posse, from whom she’s concealing the real reason for her “vacation.” The group includes her ex-husband, Robby, and his buff new girlfriend, Jane; her childhood best friend, Charly, and husband Jared, on shaky ground due to Jared’s roving eye and their difficulty conceiving a child; and a new member of the group, Tom, a slimy work associate of the men whose appeal lies primarily in his yacht. Off they all sail to the island of Catalina, where the lying, drinking, and pill-popping escalate to no good end. The narrative tone of Jacobs’ debut echoes the numbed nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis’ early work, and her protagonist is just as lovely a person as his infamous characters.
For those who appreciate the joys of a vicarious bender and the satisfaction of watching creepy people decompensate.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-11975-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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