A young girl quests for a cat. And no, it’s not Alice in Wonderland.
What is Danielewski’s (The Fifty Year Sword, 2012, etc.) latest about? Might as well ask what the Coriolis effect is about: the world spins, and air blows, and that’s the way it is, much as this oversized, overstuffed book spins and—well, furthers the story begun last spring with One Rainy Day in May. Pre-adolescent Xanther is brainy, confused, and petulant: “Mom, like I hate the supermarket?” “You do?” “Oh, uhm, I love hanging around stuff I can’t have?” Xanther, whose favorite typographic symbol is an often sarcastic but sometimes genuinely puzzled question mark, is also cat-crazy, and ailurophiliac moments abound. Cats and their kin are just some of the animals that pass through these pages. So do many human types, from LA gangsters to Asian yuppies to Turkish cops to homegrown geeks. Miley Cyrus, too, one of many figures and tropes from pop culture to turn up. Match a herky-jerky narrative and multiple protagonists with nested-parenthetical stream-of-consciousness to do Joyce proud, and you’re in tall postmodern cotton, and with literary and subliterary allusions to match, tucked away among the tangled storylines: “A single piece of paper inside, with a fiery orange paperclip holding nothing together, makes it clear Warlock is no Connelly or Nesbø.” All fine and well, though there’s some iffy syntax (“Xanther’s scream calls to life the house”) and some odd attempts at Chinglish and other dialects (“at entrance jingjing see he the damn pah chiao one”). But no worries, if you can make out clauses such as this: “sleeps the little one [like a little cloud {a blind little lamb <ever a question mark <<of a different king ((kind!))>> >}].”
Readers with an interest in the latest in literary experimentalism will thrill at Danielewski’s approach and clamor for the 25 volumes planned to follow in the Familiar series. Others, not so much.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-71496-2
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Categories: FANTASY | LITERARY FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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