Nicely plotted and well drawn, with believable characters in simple yet compelling situations: a winner.
A brisk second effort from Lasser (Battle Creek, 1999) that gets behind the scenes on Wall Street.
Barry Schwartz, like many New Yorkers, was born far from Manhattan and didn’t move there for the scenery. “I don’t want to lay siege to the riches of Wall Street,” he admits. “I want to make a frontal assault.” A self-confessed “ski bum,” Barry had been perfectly content living in a prefab shack in Colorado (where he could ski 150 days a year)—until his wife Rachel had a second child and Barry discovered what “debt” really meant. So he packed himself and family off east and landed a job downtown selling US treasury bonds. There are two things to understand about Wall Street. First, the salaries are merely tokens of esteem—everyone really works for the year-end bonus, awarded in proportion to one’s annual sales. Second, it’s a very small place, where everyone knows everyone else. Barry’s boss, Court Harvey, went to the same Michigan high school as Barry (a few years ahead of him), and the lovely government securities trader Gretchen Barnes knew Barry at Dartmouth. This connection becomes helpful when Court falls for Gretchen and uses Barry to introduce him. In fact, it leads indirectly to Barry’s promotion, which leads to another promotion, which leads—well, you get the idea. But there are clouds on the horizon. Barry’s ne’er-do-well brother Ben has begun to hit him up for money, Rachel and the kids complain that they hardly ever see him, and Gretchen confesses she hates Court and has a crush on Barry. Eventually Rachel takes the kids and moves back to Colorado, leaving Barry on his own with the million-dollar question: What do you really need to be happy in life? On Wall Street, of course, that’s a no-brainer—but not when Rachel’s in Colorado.
Nicely plotted and well drawn, with believable characters in simple yet compelling situations: a winner.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41325-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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