Poet Cotler’s (Sonnets to the Humans, 2012, etc.) affecting, lyric novel is a long letter from writer Rider Sonnenreich to his sister Leya, its subject nothing less than the mind of an artist.
Both Rider and his sister repeatedly suffered “glimmers” (seizures) as children, and Leya has come to represent something of Rider’s muse, a complicated, ephemeral figure whom he doesn’t wholly understand, yet he’s drawn to her and makes her the subject of his art. She exists mostly in the folds of his memory, though, and readers learn in the opening pages that she has disappeared to Europe, of which Rider remarks: “It’s beautiful enough.” At the behest of his mother, he bums around different European cities, supposedly looking for her but finding instead a variety of bohemians whom he regards like a poet. When he eventually reconnects with her, his memory blends with her present incarnation, which involves dissociation and a bathtub slicked with vomit. Readers looking for a tidy travel narrative should look elsewhere; one scene here takes place in “Gigot’s annex,” full of slightly stoned Italians and expats, and Rider imagines himself there as a boy who would “squat in the corner and cover [his] ears” if given his way. In the same scene, he reveals that he “wouldn’t mind becoming sharper, crazy I mean, not weak-minded crazy. Subtle disconnections.” It’s the voice of a poet in Europe: romantic and sarcastic to the bone, simultaneously jaded and full of wonder. Featuring this kind of overt meditation that’s often on a writer’s mind can be risky, but Cotler pulls it off, injecting feeling into each image, each response, each gesture. It’s no slight to call this a poet’s novel—its narrative thrust is a lyrical one, its strengths are its precision of thought and image, variety of prose and the depth of its meditations. The novel is addressed to the sister, in second person, casting the reader as a voyeur. Or is it really the reader who is addressed, cast as the sister, to whom the poet addresses his interior missives? Cotler stays one step ahead: “Art, I guess, can unintentionally insult the viewer by presuming to include him.” A beautiful, disturbing portrait of an artist.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1849822459
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MP Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
