A Valentine to marriage as it is actually lived in troubled times.
An emotional richness permeates this short novel about a couple on the verge of ending their marriage while pondering whether they can salvage it.
In recent years, O’Nan (Emily, Alone, 2011, etc.) has emerged as an accomplished chronicler of the bittersweet mundane, the everyday stories of characters who are no better or worse than their readers, but simply human, suffering through lost jobs, disintegrating families, dashed dreams, while showing a resilience in the appreciation of whatever blessings their lives afford them. Marking their 30th wedding anniversary, Art and Marion prepare for their impending divorce by taking one last trip together, a re-creation of their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. It’s a splurge they can no longer afford, as they’ve both lost their jobs and they’re about to lose their house, but Art hopes that going for broke at the casino with what little they have saved can reverse their fortunes. And though they’ve both had affairs that neither have been able to forget and at least one has found it hard to forgive, they still love each other. Or are comfortable with each other. Or at least used to each other. She recognizes that she has “succumbed to the inertia of middle age” while he worries that “without Marion he wouldn’t know what to do or even who he was.” So they spend their weekend drinking and gambling, grumbling about the tourist attractions, attending a Heart concert with a bunch of other middle-aged fans (a hilarious set piece), stumbling toward making love, complaining about uncomfortable shoes and going to the bathroom (a lot, for such a compact narrative). Each chapter title gives the odds on something to do with the novel (“Odds of a married couple making love on a given night: 1 in 5,” “Odds of Heart playing ‘Crazy on You’ in concert: 1 in 1”). Given the novel’s subtitle, A Love Story, the odds of it not ending tragically are pretty good.
A Valentine to marriage as it is actually lived in troubled times.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02316-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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