An irreverent, goofball, witty and surprisingly compelling experiment.
Two Southern men riff, rant and trade non sequiturs in the latest literary stunt from Powell (Creative Writing/U. of Florida).
Following 2009’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel in which every sentence was a question, this slim novel is built out of brief chapters written exclusively in dialogue between two men sitting and biding their time “[s]omewhere between Bakersfield, California, and Jacksonville, Florida.” Similarly, their conversation topics can and do go anywhere: Jayne Mansfield’s cleavage, barber poles, war, sanity, Southern lore, existential notions of identity and more. The banter recalls Waiting for Godot, though the chatter here is more pun-driven than absurdist. When Powell gets deep into wordplay, the book can be great fun, as chapters that begin as sober discussions of, say, Johnny Weissmuller collapse into ridiculous lines of dialogue like, “We could go down to Blockbuster in the vinegar and get Tarzan.” For all the verbal mugging, though, Powell does raise some provocative questions: “What is the big picture?” “Why do we talk?” “Are we free?” What does it mean to live today like it’s the last day of your life? Clear answers to such heady questions aren’t forthcoming, of course, and the novel is bound to frustrate anybody looking for a conventional narrative arc. What this chicken-fried Phaedo does have going for it is its verve and enthusiasm for language—every page reflects Powell’s restless urge to make up words, to drill into them, to apply new meanings to them and sometimes just to revel in the sound of language. For instance: “Be neat, be brave, be Buster-Brown bustamente.” “What does that mean?” “I do not know. But does it not sound right?” If you’re willing to at least consider that question, spending time with Powell’s rambles can be great fun.
An irreverent, goofball, witty and surprisingly compelling experiment.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-212613-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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
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