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 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
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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