It’s being touted as the story of a contemporary Messiah, and that may have been the author’s original intention. The...
Zurhellen’s debut is a collection of loosely linked monologues and stories (two of them previously published) in search of a story line.
It’s being touted as the story of a contemporary Messiah, and that may have been the author’s original intention. The chapters (or stories) have biblical titles; a possible Son of God is glimpsed at the end; Satan makes brief opening and closing statements. But these are fragments embedded in a hodgepodge of stories spanning close to 30 years (1983-2010). The first introduces Roxy, an alcoholic waitress, and her husband Dill, staying at a motel outside Bismarck, N.D. Dill, an ex-con, reveals he’s on the lam. Roxy finds a baby outside their door. Unable to conceive, she appropriates it, naming it Sam. After Dill shoots the alleged father dead, Roxy takes off with Sam in their stolen van. That’s too much action jammed into too small a space. Zurhellen next brings on a new set of characters in the small town of Nazareth, N.D., dominated by the veteran sheriff, Severo Rodriguez, a brutal and corrupt official and Zurhellen’s most successful characterization; but even this episode is marred by abrupt viewpoint switches (a recurrent problem) and a botched climax. Severo is set to burn down an illegal roadhouse, apparently with his older son inside, but we only learn the outcome much later. And so it goes: with each time shift, a mess of new characters, none of them developed. Roxy’s cousin Betsy has a miracle baby, Jan, who cures his father’s stroke. Sam is a miracle baby too, for Roxy stops drinking after “adopting” him. Yet mother and son never have a heart-to-heart, and it is the preacher Jan who dominates the final section, conducting river baptisms and dunking cousin Sam. Might one be the Messiah and the other his messenger? Don’t expect pat answers.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9845105-6-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Atticus Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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