A novel with the feel of a rambling memoir.
Hellenga’s episodic novel traces the fortunes of a family-owned bookshop and the lives it touches.
Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd., a purveyor of used and collectible books, is a pillar of its Hyde Park neighborhood, near the University of Chicago. Gabriel, the third generation of the Johnson book dynasty, begins work as a teenager in the shop alongside his grandfather Chaz and father, Charles Jr. Beginning in 1970, in each chapter the action jumps ahead by days, months, or years. We learn about the rare book trade, auctions, the appraisal process, and the escalating price wars as private collectors passionate about books are outbid by billionaires seeking just another trophy. Milestones in American bookselling are checked off. Johnson’s is one of the many bookstores to be bombed for stocking The Satanic Verses. The juggernaut of big-box bookselling rolls over independent stores—and then comes Amazon—but, still, Johnson’s endures. Only the increasing movement of the collectible book trade to online sales deals the death blow. Meanwhile, Gabe grows up and grows older. His mother deserted the family long before; and his first love, Olivia, deserts Gabe for Yale, where an affair with a professor leaves her pregnant. Olivia will return to give birth to daughter Saskia and, later, to manage the Hyde Park Borders store, but whenever Gabe’s romantic hopes rise, she dashes them. Now in his 50s, Gabe, who has never married, sells everything and buys a house teetering on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Then Borders’ bankruptcy and Olivia’s own belated maturity take a hand. Partly owing to a supporting cast of colorful eccentrics, including Father Gregory, desperate to unload the library of a defunct Catholic college; Delilah, scion of a funeral home chain; and Augie, a garrulous elderly former gangster, the story ambles along amiably, never failing to instruct and, somewhat less often, entertain. Gabe never fully emerges as a character since his role is principally that of a spectator to the lives of others as well as his own.
A novel with the feel of a rambling memoir.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-883285-85-2
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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