Olson's outlandish novels (Seaview, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame) are, at their best moments, balanced with a risky imagination that can send a reader beyond incredulity and into fascination. Here, however, the scales don't come even close to the horizontal: in a mishmash of "deep-image" episodes and pretentious, unbelievable monologues ("The memory. To ferret facts out of that mire, to draw conclusions, as if the vividness of the facts could make them real events and not just colorful constructions that remain constantly suspect") and randomly lurid tableaux, Olson has come up with an unintentionally hilarious piece of work. The protagonist is David, a masseur who was left by wife Lorca and then spent almost a decade as the roomate of a fashion designer named Anson—a man we're asked to believe David didn't realize was gay until he surprises him in bed with another man (and then later when Anson contracts AIDS). Anson's body after his death is spirited off mysteriously to Utah, where David goes in pilgrimage/search, giving massages on the way to old friends and clients, all of whom at the end—Anson in his grave; Lorca as a bee-keeping painter; a member of the Catholic hierarchy recently sprung from the closet (a massage client of David's in New York); and groups of various friends—are reunited at a Utah artist's colony through a series of coincidences that would have made O. Henry blush. This grand reunion is climaxed by a mass massage that Olson clearly means to be an apotheosis of supra-sexuality, but that a reader can read only while biting down on his or her fist to stifle the giggles. Olson, in fact, begins to seems the literary equivalent of the all-flash contemporary realist painter Eric Fischl: an essentially voyeuristic imagination that doctors itself up in the trappings of emblematic meditations on sex and mystery. Beneath it all, though, it's fiction lite-style, with precious little that's original or meaningful.
Pub Date: June 3, 1987
ISBN: 1892295350
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Linden/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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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