The expansive story, which substitutes dozens of subplots for the irresistible momentum of The Ice Harvest, couldn’t be more...
Phillips returns to Wichita, Kansas, the scene of the darkly hilarious crimes of The Ice Harvest (2000), to spin out undreamed-of details of what happened long before and long after.
Things have changed for retired cop Gunther Fahnstiel since the night of New Year’s Eve 1978, when he popped up in The Ice Harvest’s finale as the dimwit ex-machina who ended feckless attorney Charlie Arglist’s equally inept crime spree when he and his wife Dot accidentally backed their RV over him. Ten years after struggling with an equally refractory backhoe to bury Charlie’s body in Lester Carswell’s quarry, Gunther’s gone AWOL from the Lake Vista Elder Care Facility in search of the money he found in Charlie’s car and stashed somewhere or other. The news of addled Gunther’s escape draws an unlikely crew of pursuers and investigators to his trail: Ed Dieterle, a retired fellow officer who high-tails it up from Dallas; Gunther’s stepson Sidney McCallum, the bouncer who now runs local strip joint the Sweet Cage; Gunther’s ex-lover Loretta Gandy, who’s hiding a criminal secret of her own; and Dot, still fearful that the cops will get a line on Charlie’s money. A long, looping series of flashbacks to 1952 suggests that Dot’s fears are groundless because there are enough unsolved (often unsuspected) local felonies stretched out to the distant past as far as the eye can see to keep the searchers busy for another three or four volumes—assuming, of course, that the searchers, walkaways all, weren’t too interested in getting drunk and laid ever to find out the truth about anything in Phillips’s topsy-turvy world.
The expansive story, which substitutes dozens of subplots for the irresistible momentum of The Ice Harvest, couldn’t be more different from the chilly anecdote to which it serves as both prequel and sequel. After such a pair of tours de force, it’s hard to imagine what Phillips will come up with next.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44020-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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