An intimate study of love and friendship, and the stoic resignation with which we sometimes do without both, this latest from poet Chernoff (Signs of Devotion, 1993, etc.) introduces four memorable characters on a quest for human compassion. Irena, a recently arrived immigrant from Poland, leaves her mathematician past to explore the new world of Chicago with eyes both bright and bitter. She has found work caring for the aged Harrison Waters, a once-renowned jazz pianist left sad and wistful because of crippling arthritis. Moments of the pair's lives are comfortingly exchanged: Irena talks of Josef, the lover she left behind in Warsaw, and Mr. Waters reminisces about his beloved wife Gwen. Further up in their posh Chicago high-rise, meanhwile, lives one of the more compelling characters of recent fiction: 79-year- old Jack Kaufman. Dying of cancer, Jack is cared for by the beautiful and elusive Elizabeth (fleeing memories too painful to admit), who meets Irena in the basement laundry room. Though the two become companions, sharing the details of their lives with old men, their friendship is that of exiles, built on mutual loneliness, not affection. Despite the dynamic of the women's relationship, the book's focus always gravitates back to Jack Kaufman. He relates the checkered history of his life to his estranged grandson Adam, who is videotaping this piece of Chicago history for his thesis. From Jack's meager beginning as a skinny Jewish kid on the streets, to his rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld during the Depression, to a final ascension placing him among the wealthiest businessmen of the city, Jack is a compelling slice of urban Americana. Though the plot eventually falters a bit, rushing everyone to Poland for the finale, it's only a slight flaw in a well-crafted story. Charismatic characters turn what might have been just a study in the solace of memories into an enjoyable and engaging novel.
Pub Date: May 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-56689-041-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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