Timeless questions. Tedious answers.
An author of award-winning short stories (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) considers life, death, and what comes after in his debut novel.
Jim Byrd is dead at the age of 33. And then, a few minutes later, he’s alive again. This experience has some disturbing repercussions. The first is a surgical implant that reminds his heart to keep beating—which comes with a phone app to let him know every time his heart forgets. The second is that Jim has to go on living with the knowledge that his death wasn’t accompanied by a bright light or an angel chorus. With a constant reminder of his own mortality in his pocket and evidence that the great beyond is an eternity of nothingness, Jim goes on a quest for hope and meaning that involves a paranormal investigator, experimental physics, and church services led by holograms. While this novel is set in the not-too-distant future, none of the issues that it addresses are new. Living with the knowledge of death is a universal predicament. Science fiction has been investigating the ways in which new technologies challenge our humanity since Frankenstein, and horror novels from Dracula to Jennifer Egan’s The Keep have made use of the eerie qualities of phenomena like long-distance communication. Thomas Edison sincerely believed he could invent a “spirit phone,” an idea that gets a 21st-century spin here. What Pierce does with all these tropes is make them boring. One of the experts Jim consults insists that nothing in the universe exists more than 93 percent of the time. This would be a more chilling observation if Jim, himself, was ever fully real. Nothing about him—his job, his friendships, his marriage—seems worthy of sustained attention. The narrative is all just a lot of plodding exposition as Jim fumbles along. He has almost no inner life, which is especially unfortunate since he is not just the protagonist, but also the narrator. There’s a second, related tale woven into Jim’s story. It is, at some moments, slightly more compelling than the main text, but it mostly just makes a slow novel slower.
Timeless questions. Tedious answers.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59463-253-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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