A humorous novel about very unfunny things.
This genius has as many insecurities as the rest of us—and a quirky family that helps her address mortality.
Rayfiel is a shape-shifting writer. After the beautiful and mysterious monologue of In Pinelight (2013), his last novel, this new work presents what amounts to a morbidly funny conversation. There is little narration, with the book taking place almost entirely in dialogue, and Rayfiel creates clear and memorable characters through their banter. Kara Bell is a 23-year-old small-town girl who's pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy in New York City. Diagnosed with cancer, she returns to Witch’s Falls, Arkansas, in search of a bone-marrow match within her family. She's a fish out of water in this town of no secrets, at odds with her mother, cynical about her brother's vacuous girlfriend and tattoo business, lustfully infatuated with her old friend Christy, and literally dying to get out of town. Neither her brother, Gerald, nor her mother, Jean, is a match for her, and they're reluctant to give her any information about her late father’s family as another potential source for the transplant. Kara is thoroughly grounded in epistemology but can't find the answers she needs for her cure. When her mother insists she see the local doctor for a second opinion, she finds out she's pregnant with the child of her 75-year-old doctoral adviser, a genius himself. At physical risk because of her illness and indifferent to motherhood given her strange relationship with her own mother, she has Christy take her to an abortion clinic in Little Rock. She may hold the answers to the universe in her brilliant head, but secrets begin to emerge about her life and her family that she could never have guessed, and life becomes something she has to figure out without the guiding voice of Kant in her ear. “The thing-in-itself. Not what we perceive through our senses but what is. What we can never know.”
A humorous novel about very unfunny things.Pub Date: March 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3246-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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