Humorous, quick like the wind: fiction that peers at an imaginary life never head-on but through a multitude of sideways...
Having an extra leg doesn’t mean you can’t have a full life.
When author Dunn (the fictional one, not the real one who wrote Ella Minnow Pea, 2001) sent the only manuscript copy of his new novel to the editor at MacAdam/Cage, the editor promptly destroyed it (accidentally, in her bath), leaving no choice but to publish the end matter as a book in its own right. This rather daunting idea is made more palatable by the fact that Dunn is not only rather garrulous in his notes, but that his subject, the fictional life of three-legged Jonathan Blashette, is dramatic enough to be told easily in the margins. To nobody’s surprise, the Arkansas-born Blashette finds work early in life as a circus freak, with Thaddeus Grund and his Traveling Circus and Wild West Show. It’s a marginal existence, being stuck in a second-rate carnival, and three-legged Blashette is made for bigger things. After a stint in WWI, Blashette has a revolutionary idea: men’s underarm deodorant. His company, Dandy-de-odor-o, Inc., is bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, whom Blashette met in his circus days (a long story), just one of the many famous people Blashette would claim to have met in his life. There was the cab ride with the man who would become Rudolph Valentino, and drinks with the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, Woody Guthrie, and Betty Ford. Dunn’s tale is a sort of anti–E.L. Doctorow one: historical fiction of a sort, covering the 1880s through the 1960s, but refreshingly non-epic, reveling in odd comic details (like the unimpressive Bowery Hotel “Round Table” that Blashette belonged to, sad imitation of the Algonquin) and non sequiturs of the David Foster Wallace school.
Humorous, quick like the wind: fiction that peers at an imaginary life never head-on but through a multitude of sideways glances, peeking through fingers and intimating stranger things than can be imagined in the light of day.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-65-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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