Ison’s fine writing is lost in this tale of relationship hell.
Ison’s second novel (A Child Out of Alcatraz, 1997) is a bit of a letdown—as vague and drawn out as the breakup it describes.
Al and Isabel are at it again, splitting-up, complaining to friends, assuring everyone that this time they’re really going through with it. But after only a few days on his brother’s couch, Al is back in Isabel’s gleaming apartment; however, this time the two have a plan. Unable to let go just yet, they decide to write a list of things they always meant to do together. After checking off all the items on the list, they plan to part with a sense of amicable closure. Though the idea begins well enough, with dinner on the Santa Monica Pier and a romantic evening on the roof of a hotel, soon the innocuous list becomes an orchestrated excuse for petty revenge. The two like each other well enough, have had a companionable few years together, a healthy sex life, so why split, and why the animosity? Isabel, a med student at UCLA, wants more than Al, an indie-film director who now prefers watching movies to making them. Though the two love each other, Isabel can’t imagine him at future cocktail parties, and unfortunately (hence all the reconciliations) can’t imagine her life without him. And though Ison should be praised for not turning this into the kind of romance in which the two see that all those silly differences of ambition don’t mean anything in the face of true love, the lovers appear so indifferent and disconnected that their staying or parting would seem to make little difference. Soon they are forcing each other into situations designed for discomfort, and not long after that, “accidents” start happening. When they finish the list, they decide to add more items, prolonging what is becoming a simple means to hurt the other and themselves. Though some psychological depth could be gleaned from a relationship so dependent on inertia and suffering, neither Al nor Isabel are compelling enough to make their slow descent into misery worth the bumpy ride.
Ison’s fine writing is lost in this tale of relationship hell.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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