With his subtitle, "The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling," Helprin winks at the picaresque, Torn Jones tradition in which this enormously ambitious, enormously talented, and enormously unsuccessful first novel is shakily grounded. Certainly Marshall's cosmopolitan odyssey has its picarequisite share of outlandish incident and ourtrageous coincidences: born to a dying Jewish refugee on a Palestine-bound ship in 1947; raised by a rich Jew in the Hudson Valley (where he wrestles with an eagle) and Jamaica (where, being a sharpshooter/genius, he leads an Anglo attack on Rastafarians); half-educated at Harvard; employed at a nightmare-like slaughterhouse; shipwrecked and happenstanced into the arms of his childhood sweetheart; propelled through Europe to Israel, where he serves—all unbeknownst—under his real father in the bureaucracy Israeli army, just in time to predict and survive (?) the October War. But neither Helprin nor Marshall has the high-spirited drive to send one set-piece snowballing into the next; we're constantly aware of the arbitrariness of the design and the sheer locomotive effort. And despite—or because of—his myriad endowments and extensive introspections, the mythic hero remains faceless, a distinct drawback when his fortunes swing toward the earthbound. Marshall's identity-search is clearly intended to work serio-comically on both personal (autobiographical?) and theme-dream/East-West levels—a tricky business. That it works on neither is no reflection on Helprin's basic narrative equipment, which, aside from slips into sophomorics (to an admiral: "Are you contemplating your naval problems?"), lyric pretensions, or New Yorker-ish listmaking, can dish up the ironies, dialects, and images needed to keep pace with his prodigious imagination. That imagination has been on better display in Helprin's short stories and will no doubt be on better display in sharper, less grandiose novels to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1977
ISBN: 0156031078
Page Count: 564
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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