Strained and stagy.
Mullins (The Rug Merchant, 2006) examines a family that has never recovered from a grievous blow it suffered in 1982.
Back then, seven-year-old Oliver and his older sister Mary were eagerly awaiting the baby boy their parents had adopted when their father, a pathologist, suddenly died and their sorrow-stricken mother decided not to go through with the adoption. She took up with the bland, steady lawyer-next-door, dubbed by the children “Mr. Nice Guy,” and they built a new life just a few feet away from the old one and its lingering ghosts. Now it’s 2003, and the obsessive Oliver—his death-fixation reflected in his business making memorial videos commissioned by the bereaved—believes he’s located the long-lost would-be brother. While stalking the young man at his job as a grocery bagger, Oliver encounters and is smitten by free-spirited Miranda, a photographer whose current project involves choosing a person at random from the phone book, writing the person a “Dear Stranger” letter, and asking him or her to turn on the interior lights at home for an hour on a particular evening, an hour during which Miranda will be set up outside to record a candid shot of whatever the person is doing. Miranda and Oliver fall for each other, and her artistic and his personal quest intersect in credulity-straining ways. Oliver’s approach to the lost brother goes terribly wrong, with an aftermath that devastates the family again and brings even distant Mary back home to help. That Mary’s method of handling her grief has been literally to rise above it all—she’s a vain and emotionally chilly flight attendant—says something about the author’s notion of artfulness.
Strained and stagy.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02143-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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