Very cerebral and rather obvious.
From novelist (Harry Gold, 2000) and biographer Dillon (Paul Bowles, et al.): a spare psychoanalytical tale constructed much like a “serious art film,” with ambiguous scenes and loaded dialogue.
It’s circa 1960, and Lorle, a divorced mother, is in a car with her lover Edmund on an overnight trip to California’s gold country. Adoring Edmund, she can’t stop analyzing his every gesture, even as he avoids intense dialogue. When the car breaks down, they must leave it at a local garage and fly home. A man named Vern gives them a ride to the airport. Later, Vern invites Edmund to come pan for gold, but Edmund rebuffs him. Back in the city, Lorle sees a note on Edmund’s door signed “Love, Carol” and is inflamed with jealousy. Soon Edmund, who was previously Lorle’s analyst, breaks off with her and marries Carol because Carol offers him peace. He recommends a new analyst to Lorle, who grows emotionally stronger while Edmund weakens. When he visits Lorle, they make love but she gives him an ultimatum: not to visit again unless he calls by Saturday. Before the deadline, he has a fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, Vern, who, like Edmund, has not emotionally recovered from his WWII experiences, lives cut off from his past—in a cabin—until visited by his boyhood friend Neal. On a return visit to Neal in the city, he meets a woman who’s opening a resort in Mexico. His lonely life no longer satisfying, he looks up Lorle and invites her to Mexico. She accepts, though she’d refused to do the same with Edmund, fearing too much strangeness. In Mexico, Vern and Lorle find great sexual chemistry, he now obsessed with her the way she’d been with Edmund, she disengaged just as Edmund had been. Frustrated and angry, Vern storms out. Driving around, he saves some people in fire. When he returns, he and Lorle find a bittersweet peace and head home.
Very cerebral and rather obvious.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05216-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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