An American gothic of a heartland holocaust and its effect on a bunch of pathetic antiheroes in a Wisconsin hamlet. Leaving the street-smart blend of hipness and dead-end helplessness of his debut novel, The Right Man for the Job (1997), Magnuson aims high but shoots low in a tale that tries to answer big questions about the roles of religion, faith, and hypocrisy in small-town America but uncovers mostly sexual frustration and a craven desire to escape responsibility. During a punishing summer drought that brings the inhabitants of McCutcheon, Wisconsin, to a spiritual low, TV weatherman Lucky Littlefield, an import from Georgia’s Bible Belt, inserts some of his old-time religion into his forecast—a —pray for rain— message that leads to massive group prayer sessions and good ratings for Littlefield’s station. Only Grady McCann, a hard-drinking maintenance man at a senior-citizens— home, seems aware that Littlefield’s feet are made of clay. Grady is also jealous because his beautiful, sexually repressed, Catholic wife, Erica, works as Littlefield’s personal assistant. On a booze-soaked Friday night at the Liquid Forest Bar, Grady gets a black eye after Kate, a flirtatious local college student, beats off his clumsy attempt at seduction. Kate calls Erica and announces that Grady is having an affair with her. Erica in turn punishes Grady by telling him she’s had an affair with Lucky, while, a few miles away, a stray meteorite ignites a field of dry grass and starts a fire that will destroy the town, drive Littlefield and Erica into madness, pair Grady with the vacillating Vietnam vet priest Father Mary, and ultimately bring a torrential rainfall that floods what hasn’t already been burnt. Magnuson’s characters exhibit the loopy, comic small-town eccentricities of Harry Crews’s Florida crackers. Too bad that, when they—re not ranting futilely about the existence of God, these ones are too preposterously vicious to redeem this tortured allegory. An ambitious, exasperating effort that finds more glory in destruction than it does in the human spirit.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017595-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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