Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy: a welcome change from the cloistered, self-absorbed...
Following an off-key memoir (Aftermath, 2012), Cusk returns to fiction and top form in a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and others.
The nameless narrator is on a plane from London to Athens to teach a summer writing course when an older Greek man begins to confide in her about his unhappy childhood. After learning the narrator is divorced, he tells her about his own marital misadventures. “So much is lost…in the shipwreck,” he says mournfully. It’s the first of many keening conversation she has with her students, Greek friends and fellow writers. They reveal marriages splintered when shared assumptions diverge; parents wearied by their children’s demands but ambivalent when they cease; the struggle to give up comforting illusions and face reality—but then again, don’t we all construct our own realities? (That question, unsurprisingly, especially preoccupies her younger students.) As they pour forth the particulars of their lives, the narrator sparingly doles out some of hers while coping with texts and phone calls from her needy sons. Pained by the disconnect “between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have,” she says, “I had decided to want nothing at all….I was trying to find a different way of living in the world.” The existential musing can get somewhat abstract, but it’s grounded by Cusk’s knack for telling details: the slightly reddened eyes of the narrator’s friend who asks for a nonalcoholic beer or the vivid makeup of a woman whose unfaithful husband has just redecorated his office entirely in white. The individual stories collectively suggest that self-knowledge is a poor substitute for happiness, but perhaps readers can find some hope from the narrator’s admission that she can’t shake “this desire to be free…despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.”
Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy: a welcome change from the cloistered, self-absorbed feel of Arlington Park (2007) and The Bradshaw Variations (2010).Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22834-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
