Conflict without confrontation makes for a very unexciting read.
Tensions simmer in a family right before deer season in the Adirondacks; an awkward first novel following a story collection (Crow Man, not reviewed).
Gary Hazen is a forester in the North Country, in upstate New York, managing 40,000 acres for absentee owners. It’s not an easy life, and money is always tight for Gary, wife Susan and his sons, 24-year-old Gary David and 19-year-old Kevin. Yet Gary loves the woodsman’s life, and has conditioned his sons to love it too. Or has he? Gary David is obedience itself, but Kevin shows signs of straying from the reservation: He’s attending college and considering teaching, and his vegetarian girlfriend has persuaded him not to hunt this season. Gary has another problem: There’s a new environmental conservation officer, Josephine Roy, and the young woman will enforce all the hunting rules (Gary has been cutting corners to ensure enough venison for his family). Josephine is also having nocturnal trysts with Gary David, who’s too scared to tell his dad. Bailey’s principal theme is the nature of parental love, the importance of letting go. What he doesn’t have is a plot. We know early on the Hazens will encounter tragedy on the first day of hunting, but Bailey fails to develop a storyline that will lead us to it. Instead, we get diversions: The longest one involves a documentary film crew and some dead geese in need of painting (don’t ask). He does himself another disservice by using 13 narrators to tell his story, to pull the community into an essentially domestic tale, to involve the church, the diner and the saloon. This is Richard Russo territory, but Bailey lacks Russo’s steady hand. Narrative momentum goes out the window. When the tragedy finally occurs, without witnesses, it’s not the outcome of the father-son conflict, and that’s the biggest failing of all.
Conflict without confrontation makes for a very unexciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-307-23801-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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