Loring is Yarbrough’s Yoknapatawpha County, and he uses what in other hands could be a banal plot to bring to vital life the...
A Mississippi high-school teacher can’t separate his hometown’s uneasy past from his own in this thoughtful novel from Yarbrough (The End of California, 2006, etc).
Loring native Luke May takes a just-the-facts approach to history, teaching his students the difficulty of pinpointing cause and effect. As the school year starts, Luke is at loose ends. His daughters have gone to college, his aging parents are in failing health, he and his wife Jennifer, an aspiring poet who teaches freshman English at a nearby college, have drifted into minimal verbal and sexual communication. Then he meets the flashy new French teacher, Maggie Sorrentino, née Calloway. Maggie left Loring as a little girl in 1962, after her father Arlan shot and killed her mother Nadine in what was ruled self defense. Luke’s father considered Arlan his best friend, although the more affluent Arlan was threatening his livelihood. The night of the killing, which was also the eve of James Meredith’s historic enrollment at Ole Miss, the two men had driven to Oxford as members of the local White Citizens Council. As Luke falls into an affair with Maggie, he begins digging to uncover the truth of what happened that night 44 years ago. From a snippet of conversation Maggie remembers overhearing as a child, Ned suspects that his father, a less-than-successful farmer and admitted racist but also a war hero and devoted husband to his now-senile wife, might have had some kind of relationship with Maggie’s mother not unlike Luke’s relationship with Maggie. More sleuthing brings up a romantic connection between Nadine and Luke’s otherwise saintly mentor, local newspaper editor Ellis Buchanan, who courageously stood up for integration when no one else did. Learning the truth has its price, and Luke pays dearly.
Loring is Yarbrough’s Yoknapatawpha County, and he uses what in other hands could be a banal plot to bring to vital life the complicated interplay of cause and coincidence in history and individual lives.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27170-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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