Every page yields its pleasures—D’Souza is a natural. The only disappointment is that he has not orchestrated the lives of...
D’Souza’s second work of fiction (Whiteman, 2006), less a novel than a collection of linked stories, is at its heart about two Konkan brothers and a white American woman.
The American is Denise Klein, a poor runaway from Detroit who still achieves a college education. In 1966 she joins the Peace Corps for three extraordinary years in India among the Konkans (an ethnic minority) on the West Coast. These people share cultural traits with the Hindus yet have their own language, practice Catholicism (a legacy of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama) and have a taste for pork. The tall, glamorous white woman is noticed by Santan D’Sai, an upper-class Konkan and former police commissioner. He orders his firstborn Lawrence home from Bombay to woo Denise, who “wanted to marry India.” So she accepts the eligible bachelor, unaware this is a form of arranged marriage, just as Lawrence is unaware he is marrying below his caste. The couple leaves for Chicago, where Denise gives birth to Francisco. The little boy is the narrator; it sounds awkward, but it works. The stories are not in chronological order and are interwoven with commentaries on Konkan culture. Despite a spellbinding fairytale version of da Gama’s voyage to India, there may be too much didacticism here for some readers, especially as there’s such rich material in the relationships between Denise, Lawrence and Sam, a younger brother who joins them in Chicago. Denise favors the fun-loving Sam over her stern husband and they have an affair. There is something tragic about both brothers’ American lives: Lawrence thinks he’s white until racist assaults on his suburban home remind him otherwise, while Sam lacks the courage to defy his family and marry the black American he’s been dating.
Every page yields its pleasures—D’Souza is a natural. The only disappointment is that he has not orchestrated the lives of his three protagonists into a more focused narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101519-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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