Simple prose goes far in exploring complicated lives.
Filmmaker Miller debuts with seven spare, elegant stories delineating the haphazard choices that influence women’s journeys through life.
Daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath, the author obviously knows well the various cloistered social worlds of New York City and its rural environs whose occasional collisions she deftly portrays. The eponymous protagonist of “Louisa” (each tale is named after its heroine) watches her mother earn dubious fame as a naif artist, creating ceramics so bizarre that bohemian Manhattanites embrace the Dutchess County native with the kind of regard offered a lame pet. When Louisa grows up she becomes a painter, entangled in one affair after another, always searching for the excitement new love brings. In the troubling “Nancy,” the neglected only daughter of Manhattan socialites goes to great lengths to gain a little attention: pretending to drown at the country club swimming pool, making gruesome drawings for her nanny, a college student of child development. “Julianne” shows a woman coming to terms with being the wife of a great man. Joe, a famous writer and many years her senior, seemed a wonderful choice as a husband for a budding poet. But now the 41-year-old mother of a little girl has scant time for poetry and realizes at a dinner party filled with Joe’s intellectual buddies that she is no longer a writer herself, simply the hostess. In “Paula,” a woman being walked to her car by a man she just met in a club narrowly misses being hit by a passing vehicle, a speeder that kills her companion. Over the next few hours, the shell-shocked Paula picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be an abuse victim, tells her mother she’s pregnant but will abort, and tentatively reconciles with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. This uneven tale of luck and fate closes the collection.
Simple prose goes far in exploring complicated lives.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1699-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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