This is Philip Roth's first novel, following Goodbye Columbus, his exhilarating, uncompromising collection of short stories. It may seem somewhat surprising that he has shed the discipline of that medium to the extent of writing a book which is easily three times as expansive as most. Perhaps in the beginning there is a certain diffusion of interest in the proliferation of backgrounds, characters, talk- expert as it is (the spoken word when written loses nothing in transition). But by the halfway mark, the book gains in definition and drive. This is the story of Gabe Wallach, who has disengaged himself from his background (i.e. a supplicant, widowed father- his Jewish faith) to go to Iowa, then Chicago to teach. A cautious, civilized young man, he "values passion" but avoids it. He is a solicitous friend to the Herzes- Libby and Paul- who through their mixed marriage (Libby is a Catholic) have gone through familial excommunication to now find themselves increasingly unhappy together. But while Libby holds a certain wistful attraction for Gabe, a Jamesian intellectualized rapport- (James is a taste they share)- it is Martha Regenhart, a divorcee with a heady allure, with whom Gabe has an extended affair. And although he officiates for the Herzes in securing a baby (black market) for them, he is also partially, responsible for the fact that Martha loses her two children. It is only through all these "shufflings and separations", the "rejections and the yearnings, the demands and the hesitations and betrayals" that Gabe finally confronts his own futility. And it is ironically his one attempt to do something which is affirmative which reveals, once and for all, the ineffectuality of his marginal existence.... Roth, in this field trip just outside of the Marjorie Morningside country, would seem to posit that the assimilated Jew may fail to be an assimilated individual; one step, one generation removed from family and faith, the displacement leads to spiritual and emotional destitution. It is a clear-eyed, tough-minded contemporary commentary, and it has all this young writer's remembered virtues: bluntness, decisiveness, and above all an undiminished vitality which promises that his readers will not let go. It will get attention.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0679764178
Page Count: 807
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1962
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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