An almost narcotically depressing novel; its fine writing, artsy digressions, and close psychological study require a...
A slow, lyrical exploration of a family's unspooling after the death of a child.
As Reisman's (The First Desire, 2004) second novel begins, James and Nora Murphy are about to take their three young children on vacation from their home in Massachusetts to Rome. One of them dies in an accident there, and the novel follows the survivors, and two children born later, for decades. In those years, just about every other bad thing that can happen to a family piles on to the original tragedy, accruing in short chapters and poetic language. A landscape: "August thunderstorms...jagged lines to the northeast, and the felt-sense of water spilling over into the dark." A sex scene: "a place of liquid and muscle and bone. A salt tang, a pale gray drifting...." A dinner: "the kettle almost announcing itself as kettle, the paper shell of the garlic feathery against his skin, tart slices of lemon brilliant on the counter." One admires Reisman's skill, but these lapidary descriptions eventually become tiresome. Ornamenting the narrative further are vignettes analyzing various paintings and sculptures which can be seen in Rome—by Caravaggio, Fetti, Bernini, many more. Each moves from description into second-person philosophical inquiry. "If she could escape the harsh light, the judging view, might the shame dissolve into more tender melancholy? Beyond the frame and any view—even yours—she might rest." If these sections develop the plot, it's so subtly that one could easily skip them, like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. Too many paintings, too many houses, too many emerald green pieces of broccoli: the Murphys' lives become as wearying to the reader as they are to the Murphys themselves.
An almost narcotically depressing novel; its fine writing, artsy digressions, and close psychological study require a special sort of reader.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941040-03-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
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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