Rich in historical detail, this novel explores its themes of creativity and friendship with an unusual intensity that...
The years 1850-1851 are pivotal for Herman Melville, as his newborn relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne has a crucial influence on Moby-Dick, according to this historical novel.
Set in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where Oliver Wendell Holmes and other 19th-century literary figures reside, this first novel begins with a hike and a picnic during which Melville meets and becomes smitten with Hawthorne. The author of A Scarlet Letter is somewhat restrained from reciprocating by his deep feelings for his wife and his morality. Within a plot whose action is confined largely to trips between and visits at the writers’ homes, Beauregard sustains a fine tension with the turbulent friendship, Melville’s troubled marriage, his lack of money, and an amusing bluestocking who plants rumors of another affair. In what is otherwise a well-written debut, however, Melville’s passion and frustration produce some unfortunately overheated language: “the soft ravishments of his beauty”; “a maelstrom of joy and confusion”; “the most beautiful creature that had ever existed.” Fortunately, Hawthorne, amid the most productive period of his writing career, also inspires rich conversation and offers crucial suggestions for transmuting what had been a "grand farce" about whaling into one of the greatest American novels. The real tension and treat here is watching how a distraught, impecunious romantic finds a way to set aside all distractions in pursuit of his artistic grail. An afterword confirms the extensive research behind the people, events, dialogue, and letters depicted while noting that the letter in which Hawthorne advises on Moby-Dick is fictional. Whether Beauregard’s research supports the inference of a near affair is almost beside the point. As an element in the present novel, it is decidedly for better and only a bit for worse.
Rich in historical detail, this novel explores its themes of creativity and friendship with an unusual intensity that kindles some excesses but goes far to overshadowing them.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56233-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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