Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool.
The political and personal chaos of the summer of 2017 as it tumbles through the consciousness of a writer named Kathy.
With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing (The Lonely City, 2016, etc.) has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction. The narrative begins with Kathy's arrival in England on a plane from New York. She is met by her fiance, who we will eventually learn is also a writer, 29 years older than she. At this early point in the story, there is also another man in her life, but this turns out to be no big deal—that kind of plot is not the focus here, though Kathy will at some point get married and, at some time after that, will actually fall in love. A focus at least as prominent as this "love story" is creating a record of the ongoing avalanche of terrible news that characterizes this time in the age of Trump and Brexit, the threat of war with North Korea, various terrorist incidents, murders of innocents, Steve Bannon's resignation, etc. Another major concern is the overlap of the narrator with the character of the late transgressive feminist writer Kathy Acker. Since the real Kathy Acker died in 1997, this Kathy can't be that Kathy, but on the first page of the book, she is credited with writing Acker's books, and lines from Acker's work are woven through the text and footnoted at the end. This Kathy is close to that Kathy in body and spirit. "The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she said, I'd always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, finding her jewels....She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, and if she'd had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie's." To enjoy this book, you have to stop trying to understand it. If you can, you may well experience a warm sense of recognition at the absurdity and impossibility of trying to carry on a life in these times.
Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65272-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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