Simpson trades chapters between Claire and Lola’s viewpoints, but Claire never becomes Lola’s equal, as a character or as a...
This dour take on class and immigration from Simpson (Off Keck Road, 2001, etc.) focuses on a circle of wealthy Hollywood families and the nannies who care for their spoiled children.
Classical composer Claire moves with husband Paul and new baby William to Los Angeles where Paul pursues his dream to become a sitcom writer. Unable to concentrate on her music, Claire resents carrying most of the responsibility for William. Although she declares her maternal love frequently, readers don’t see much evidence. After Paul’s mother suggests she hire live-in help so she can work, Claire, whose carelessness as a parent grows only more mind-boggling as the novel progresses, finds Lola sitting on a park bench and hires her. Claire, or rather William, has lucked out. Lola had a comfortably middle-class life in the Philippines—a husband working as an illustrator for Hallmark, a house in the suburbs, her kids in a good school where she was President of the Parents Association—but she has come to the States to earn her children’s way through university and graduate school. While Claire is never comfortable with the parents of William’s friends, Lola quickly becomes the unspoken leader of the mostly Filipino nannies who care for them. William is a difficult child with limited social skills, but Lola loves him. She turns down a job offer from another family, sacrificing a significant raise in pay, only to be fired by Claire at the recommendation of William’s kindergarten teacher. Claire soon realizes she made a mistake, but Lola has already moved on to care for Laura, the possibly brain-damaged daughter of a single working mother, whose love and need for Lola is deeper than William’s.
Simpson trades chapters between Claire and Lola’s viewpoints, but Claire never becomes Lola’s equal, as a character or as a human being.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27352-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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