Like the best 18th-century fiction, this witty and wildly inventive novel revels in its implausibilities, and it does so with an attention to character and cosmos worthy of Swift, Fielding, or Sterne. Auster (The New York Trilogy, In the Country of Last Things) here fashions three personal histories that span the 20th-century and range across the American landscape, from the chaotic city to the desolate frontier. Marco Stanley Fogg, illegitimate and orphaned at 11, seems a victim of fate and a child of his time. At Columbia University during the 60's, Marco, always an oddball and outsider while growing up with his bachelor uncle in Chicago, begins his descent into nothingness, hoping to create from his screwy life a work of art. At best, he becomes a minimalist artifact, as he abandons his few friends and possessions, and makes a job of daily survival. Soon after graduation, this restless explorer of the self takes to the streets, sleeping in Central Park, eating from trash bins, and discovering the meaning of utter loneliness. Eventually saved from self-destruction, Marco finds love with the enigmatic Kitty Wu—a beautiful "orphan in the storm" herself- and a job with Thomas Effing—a dying octogenarian who chooses Marco as his biographer. This cantankerous codger turns out to be "a kindred spirit," a former painter who took advantage of a disastrous trip out West in 1916, and created a new identity after he was presumed dead. With his actual death planned for the near future, Effing wants the son he never met to know the truth. After Effing's death, Solomon, the abandoned son, spins his tragic tale to Marco as well. An indiscretion with a 19-year-old student back in the 50's led this "scholarly curmudgeon" on a path to academic obscurity and personal dejection. The stories of Marco, Effing, and Solomon, each told in their time and sharing a similar design, suggest not only a synchronicity of life cycles, but also prove to have a more intimate connection—a connection discovered too late to save Marco from yet another encounter with absolute loneliness. Coming so soon after a string of masterly little novels, Auster's latest attests to the expansiveness of his vision and the deepening of his voice.
Pub Date: March 1, 1988
ISBN: 0140115854
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988
IN THE NEWS
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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