Before it finally finds its groove, though, the slow pace and soft diffusiveness try the patience.
A short, quiet novel moves very slowly through uneventful lives in the 1950s.
Bea Maxwell ages from her youth to spinsterhood without ever having a serious romantic, or sexual, relationship. Her indifference to boys, or theirs to her, was apparent as early as high school. Something may, or may not, have happened to her during a short post-college stint in Chicago before she returned to Wisconsin’s Keck Road area to stay. But with faint echoes of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, she’s soon selling real estate. While Bea’s the central figure here, she shares center stage with June, a college friend and sorority queen from the “new part of town,” and with Shelley, somewhat younger, a victim of polio induced, ironically, by the polio vaccine. Two things link the three women: Keck Road and Bill Alberts. Simpson (A Regular Guy, 1996, etc.) shows how development resembles destruction. In one of the story’s finer moments, local firemen practice their craft on a tree they set ablaze, then extinguish, again and again; while Bea and Shelley look on transfixed, it is a tree they remember. Meanwhile, Bill Alberts offers the women a chance at romance, but one as compromised as Keck Road’s “progress”: he’s an unhappily married philanderer whose one true passion is jazz drumming. Across several decades, Alberts carries on flirtations with all three women, or they with him, but their dalliances never find swing time. Neither, unfortunately, does Off Keck Road. Not much happens in these lives, or in this place, over those decades. the story simply covers too much time with too little incident. History barely intrudes. And by alternating sections between Bea and Shelley, the energies get dispersed: what the novel’s about is almost defiantly concealed until nearly two thirds through. Which is too bad, because when the pace finally accelerates and the dramatic focus resolves, Simpson’s careful, quirky eye finds poignancy, even grace, in these simple lives.
Before it finally finds its groove, though, the slow pace and soft diffusiveness try the patience.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41010-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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