Ruffin’s surrealist take on racism owes much to Invisible Man and George S. Schuyler’s similarly themed 1931 satire, Black...
As with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the black narrator of this rakishly funny and distressingly up-to-the-minute debut novel doesn’t disclose his name, because, he says, “I’m a phantom, [and] a figment.”
In a near-future America where racial divisions have become, if anything, deeper and bleaker than they are now, our nameless narrator has, through guile, pluck, spit, and polish, worked his way to associate attorney with Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux, a powerful law firm with tentacles reaching to every stratum of a city known here only as the City. Though wound tight from having to look over his shoulder at every potential office competitor, the narrator is determined to do whatever he can to ingratiate himself with his bosses and secure a full partnership, whether by enduring cornball plantation tours, struggling to overcome courtroom jitters, or agreeing to be chairman and sole African-American member of the firm's “diversity committee.” It’s all for the sake of his biracial son, Nigel, who has a black birthmark on his face that's grown so large over time that the narrator will try anything to make it fade, from oversized baseball caps for blocking the sun to skin-lightening creams whose application bewilders Nigel and enrages his white mother, Penny. The narrator is desperate for his son to avoid the fate of many other black men who have been consigned either to substandard neighborhoods or, as is the case with the narrator’s estranged father, prison. (“The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from his basic human dignity,” the narrator laments.) But a bigger paycheck from his firm would enable the narrator to pay for what promises to be the ultimate solution: an experimental medical procedure that will not only remove Nigel’s birthmark, but make him look totally Caucasian. Whether they're caused by delusion, naiveté, dread, rage, or some combination thereof, the narrator’s excesses sometimes make him as hard for the reader to endure as he is for those who either love or barely tolerate him. But his intensely rhythmic and colorful voice lifts you along with him on his frenetic odyssey.
Ruffin’s surrealist take on racism owes much to Invisible Man and George S. Schuyler’s similarly themed 1931 satire, Black No More. Yet the ominous resurgence of white supremacy during the Trump era enhances this novel’s resonance and urgency.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50906-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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