Slack, thin, with alienating details and characters.
Another tedious road journey across America as a tiresome narrator searches for spiritual nourishment.
A sinking feeling sets in when Katherine, narrator, looks down the American highway and sees “nothing but a nation plunged in darkness” and then defines as an American “one who can achieve the needs of his or her appetite.” Little follows to support or freshen the overworked theme that Murray (Slow Burn, 1990) thus establishes. Flying home from Europe, Katherine filches her seatmate’s copy of Vanity Fair. Her smirking attitude makes a reader wish her fellow passenger would throw a soft drink in face and tell her to get a life. Instead, Katherine heads to New York City, where she hooks up with the equally unappealing Boris Naryshkin, author of “depressing books” like Soulless Man. Katherine spends a great deal of time eating, her hunger stimulated, it appears, from an obsession with cannibalism. Periodically, she segues into excruciatingly detailed descriptions of the Donner Party, the Packer expedition, and the tales of cannibalism behind Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Readers who haven’t already jumped ship will follow Katherine’s rootless life as she heads across America, down to Mexico, then back to the East Coast. But rather than having her look outward at the land—thereby developing her broad thesis—Murray has her obsessively turn inward. Clues gradually emerge that Katherine’s bizarre preoccupations stem from life with a violent mother who once laced with prescription medications the Halloween candy she handed out to her daughter’s friends. Repellant violence attends every step of Katherine’s journey (a coyote eats a truck driver alive), leaving her to wonder whether she’s the victim of an overactive imagination. Few answers follow, as Katherine stands “on the side of the road, alone and deserted.”
Slack, thin, with alienating details and characters.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1769-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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
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