A clever but seriously self-indulgent drug fantasy.
A 30-something vagabond with a closetful of addictions experiments with a macabre new career.
Bishop-Stall, better known for experiential journalism in his native Canada, unleashes a profane, anarchic host of dope fiends in his first novel. Loosely framed against the lyrical structure of Bob Seger’s song “Fire Lake,” the story is a cautionary tale about a writer whose desire to get high derails his ability to tell good stories. Mason Dubisee is a mess when we meet him, and never gets much clearer. He’s landed in Toronto with Chaz, a coolly manipulative dealer who goes to such great lengths to please his customers that he builds his own private club complete with a drug bar and a panic room. “Mason had vowed that he’d never become a dealer, but he’d broken a lot of other vows—that’s what happened if you went around vowing haphazardly like a carefree, careless monk,” writes Bishop-Stall. Instead of pulling him into the family business, Chaz sets Mason up with a gig as “The Dogfather,” a dealer of dirty-water hot dogs to the city’s worker bees. When a regular, Warren, finds out about Mason’s writing abilities, he hires him to write his suicide note. This “successful” exchange sets Mason up in business, writing goodbye letters for some equally forgettable characters. The seedy characters with which the author surrounds Mason, notably a heroin-addicted paraplegic named Willy, lead to some interesting vignettes. However, the novel is also chaotic, rocketing from drug parlor to rooftop to hungover mornings, mimicking the blackout-riddled arc of its main character. Its nine disparate sequences often play out like short stories whose narrative connections are torn and frayed. By the time Mason is pitted against “The Handyman,” a psychotic Finnish serial killer in a winner-takes-all game of cards, it’s not easy to keep rooting for him.
A clever but seriously self-indulgent drug fantasy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59376-295-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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