A lackluster attempt to see a religious subculture refracted through individual lives.
A former boy preacher finds it easier to shuck off religion than his father in this limp first novel.
The boy stands on the stage in a movie theater, bearing witness before a congregation 4,000 strong. They are members of an apocalyptic cult, Brothers in the Lord, and 12-year-old Josiah Laudermilk electrifies them by announcing the year of the End: 2000. In this Queens, New York, theater in 1980, Josiah has heard a voice and seen a vision. His parents, Gill and Ida, have been treating him as a divine messenger since a very pregnant Ida was dunked and reborn. Yet Josiah is still a child, an only child clutching his Star Wars lucky charm, and lonely as hell until he makes friends with little Issy and, later, the girl next door, Bhanu from Bangladesh. Then they disappear, first Issy (an unsolved abduction) and later Bhanu (swimming-pool accident). At times, it seems as though Cheshire’s theme of religious faith and its flawed practitioners will disappear too, as the novel drifts between Queens and Southern California. Josiah moves there after Gill becomes increasingly weird, attempting to start his own religion and insisting on bathing rules; his own faith ended in his teens, quietly, without drama. In California, improbably, Josiah becomes a retail mogul with four computer stores (three will disappear) and meets Sarah, a Jewish translator, who stays out of focus, as does their subsequent marriage. A trial separation ends with 9/11, when they have “goodbye-forever” sex and the dominoes fall: pregnancy, abortion, divorce. Josiah returns briefly to Queens to find his father gripped by religious mania, fasting so that he’s skin and bones and sleeping next to a half-filled tub in the bathroom (it’s all in Revelation).
A lackluster attempt to see a religious subculture refracted through individual lives.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9821-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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