Between V., Pynchon's maverick if disorderly first novel, and Gravity's Rainbow, which is still more unstrung and far denser while lacking the narrative encroachment of the earlier book, there is even a direct line of extension. Very literally — it is a third longer than the original's 500 pages; but where V. was only death-directed, this seems almost death-obsessed and annihilation (from the V-bombs of World War II to the later Rocket with which this is concerned) looms over every page in a world where the technology of terror presides. . . . "Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon?" Somehow surfacing above it are other nonspecific, mystic, psychokinetic forces, perhaps Gravity, the "extrasensory in Earth's mindbody," or more simply, just a sense of wonder. They are personified in Tyrone Slothrop, the central character, who is identified as some sort of receiver when first institutionalized in the Abreaction Ward of a London hospital — he's paranoid — and later tagged as the Rocketman and sent to the Zone where the later postwar action partially takes place. Around him are all sorts of others — scientists, behaviorists, friends (Tantivy, who is killed; statistician Roger Mexico, who remains trapped in the detritus of the War and is unfit for Peace) and assorted girls. It is reductive, perhaps presumptive, to say what this is all about — the "depolarizing" or neurotic instability which follows war; the metallic mechanization of life thereafter; the blacks and blackness; drugs and sex — a kind of vacant, performing sex; and a lot of catch-as-catch-can cabala all figure in Pynchon's sort of social surrealism. He has made no concessions: from the proliferation of acronyms (some very clever) to the hybrid referrals (King Kong, Murphy's Law, Godel's Theorem) tailgating each other in one paragraph; to the words (azimuth, megalo, runcible, terrenity) which are an "impedance." As of course is all this jammed input — a parlous challenge to the reader's perseverance. But then however much the latter may have been strained, one must pay tribute to Pynchon's plastic imagination, his stunning creative energy, and here and there the transcendent prose: "It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame" — all marvelously descriptive of the world in which we live and are sure to die.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1972
ISBN: 0140188592
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1972
PERSPECTIVES
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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