The use of several recurring images (an ornamental white bowl, a fire in a sewing machine factory) and Whitman’s visionary...
Ohioan Michael Cunningham produced two well-received early novels, A Home at the End of the World (1990) and Flesh and Blood (1995), then expanded his range decisively with The Hours (1998). That moving novel, which juxtaposes Virginia Woolf’s final breakdown under the looming shadow of world war with emotional crises endured by two women of later generations, was widely and appreciatively read, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize, and inspired an Oscar-winning film.
The method of The Hours is even more brilliantly employed in Speciman Days, Cunningham’s fifth novel, which tells three interrelated stories set in New York City in the historical past, near-present and imagined future. Each focuses on three characters: a physically or genetically deformed boy, a bereaved woman and a man whose fate influences, or is influenced by, their actions. “In the Machine” is set in the post–Civil War years dominated by the rise of industrialism. In it, an Irish immigrant family’s son, Simon, is mangled and killed by a machine at an ironworks that subsequently also employs his 13-year-old brother Lucas, a stoical “misshapen boy with…a habit of speaking in fits.” These “fits” are verses from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which Lucas has memorized, and from which he infers a hopeful vision of eternal recurrence; human absorption into the universal; the faith that even amid death and dissolution, “We are part of something vaster and more mysterious than the living can imagine.” Lucas’s relationships with the ghost of Simon that he hears “singing” in the machines and with Simon’s grieving fiancée Catherine (a seamstress and prostitute) is echoed, with imaginative variations, in two subsequent narratives. The Catherine of “The Children’s Crusade” is “Cat” Martin, a black forensic psychologist employed by NYC’s “Deterrence” squad to profile preadolescent suicide bombers, presumably parentless members of a deranged millennial “family” announcing the apocalyptic “end of days.” Cat forsakes the safety offered by her affluent lover, Simon (a broker who “trades in futures”), bonding with a dwarflike boy who evokes memories of her own dead son, leading her toward a “strange new life, of which he confides, “You're in the family now.” The theme of escape from a destroyed planet is stated explicitly in “Like Beauty,” in which a scientifically created “simulo” (Simon), a lizard-like alien (Catereen) and a disfigured Jonah-like boy (Luke) meet, then separate—as other survivors of a nuclear “meltdown” are “setting out to colonize a new world.”
The use of several recurring images (an ornamental white bowl, a fire in a sewing machine factory) and Whitman’s visionary idealism superbly underscore a symphonic poem of sorrow, loss, survival—and hope: Cunningham’s finest novel, and one of the important literary achievements of the new century.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 978-0-374-29962-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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