An impressive but structurally unwieldy debut.
Modernity and distances both geographical and psychological upend a South Korean family.
As noted in the indispensible prefatory character list, the Han family is divided into two branches. The American offshoot is headed by Han Hyun-kyu, a New York City surgeon whose marriage to alcoholic psychiatrist Lee Woo-in is foundering. Their two adult children, sensitive Henry, recently released from rehab, and his photojournalist sister Jane, on leave after her near-fatal brush with an I.E.D. in Baghdad, have more trauma in store—their parents’ impending breakup. Meanwhile, in South Korea, Hyun-kyu’s younger brother Jae-Kyu, also a surgeon, is leading a prosperous but not unduly ostentatious life in a small farming town. But the surface tranquility of the Korean Hans masks dark undercurrents. Jae-Kyu’s pregnant daughter Min-yung is closeted in her childhood bedroom, suffering from a mysterious illness—or is it just the unexplained absence of her feckless husband Woo-sung? Jae-Kyu’s spouse Jung-joo, with the help of housekeeper Cho Jin-sook, runs a household as tightly buttoned-down as her inner life. Exposition filtered through multiple points of view takes up much novelistic space, but the action accelerates when the Korean Hans receive a surprise visit from Jae-Kyu’s American brother, who’s gone AWOL from job and family. Seasoned globetrotter Jane handily tracks down Hyun-kyu and follows him to Korea, where they eventually wear out their welcome. Jane and Min-yung forge an instantaneous connection that has disastrous consequences. Although Chung occasionally relies too much on sudden death to add pathos, her characters are well drawn, particularly the women (except for Jane, who seems to have been plucked from another novel). But the sheer proliferation of voices clamoring to be heard mutes the narrative power, as does the overly complex subdivision of this short work into books, sections and subsections.
An impressive but structurally unwieldy debut.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9962-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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