A diverting frolic through Pearson’s particular narrative homeland, filled with eccentrics and elaborate anecdotes that will...
Pearson’s ninth outing (after Blue Ridge, 2000) is a gangly ramble: a simple tale about a Virginia ne’er-do-well whose sudden capacity to tell the future makes him helpful in the case of a missing girl.
On such a threadbare plot Pearson spins and twines a lavish embroidery, sparkling with characters, tinted by anecdotes, and darkened by an overall hue of the good-humored fatalism endemic to Pearson’s work. Things begin as Clayton, a harmless deadbeat common to the author's small-town Virginia, suddenly abandons his days of watching the pornographic Satin Channel via a pilfered cable dish; instead, he sets about producing enigmatic charcoal drawings on the walls of his house and prophetic, albeit indistinct, mutterings no one can make much sense of. Enter Police Deputy Ray and his sassy-mouthed, part-time sidekick and former girlfriend Kit. The two begin paying attention to Clayton’s phrases and drawings. At the same time, a local woman’s daughter is abducted, and the amusingly absurd account of what she does with her life in the aftermath is one of the brightest story-notes in an otherwise routine set of events. (She becomes a TV anchorwoman and drinks amply from the well of counterfeit media celebrity—a subject the author takes more than one shot at.) As it turns out, Clayton is somehow “channeling” for a member of the British Polar Expedition of 1911. Among his utterances are the names of apples, and when Ray and Kit go to an orchard, they find the girl safe and healthy. Clayton himself simply disappears at the close, perhaps fittingly in a novel more notable for its fine style and language than for the architecture of its plot.
A diverting frolic through Pearson’s particular narrative homeland, filled with eccentrics and elaborate anecdotes that will entertain while the tale is, well, gotten on with.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03035-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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