Another novel about a novelist, but radiantly colored, sensuous, respectful and rapt; an impressive debut.
Rudyard Kipling, living in rural Vermont, writes The Jungle Book and changes the destiny of his neighbors.
Vinton sets her first novel in the late-19th century and constructs it around the contrasting households of an emerging writer and a struggling immigrant farmer. Kipling and his proud, pregnant wife Carrie have arrived to build their dream house, Naulakha, on land adjacent to Jack Connolly's small spread. Kipling, with his exotic background combining India and England, relishes the beauty and isolation of this remote location; Connolly, Irish and disappointed, fumes against and fears the harsh winter and his endlessly backbreaking, scarcely profitable work. The families interact through Addie Connolly, who does the Kiplings’ laundry, and Jack's 11-year-old son Joe, who falls under the spell of Kipling's whimsical inventiveness. A dreamy, sensitive boy, Joe is initially enchanted by the writer's energy; when invited to advise on the story of Mowgli and his animal companions, he begins to identify with the fictional child. Winter closes in as Carrie—assisted by Addie—gives birth to a daughter, but Joe, having broken his leg in an accident, retreats a little from Kipling. In the spring, the writer asks Jack, an ex-railway man, to help dynamite some land. The combination of Jack's slow-burning anger, Kipling's distracting waywardness and Joe's torn loyalties leads to another, more emotional explosion. Joe runs away from home, leaving the two couples to go their separate ways. Addie sees the wisdom of Joe's absence and works to restore closeness with Jack; Kipling, simultaneously dominated and protected by Carrie, will achieve success but also experience great grief and loss. Vinton mines a rich vein of intensity whether writing about landscape and weather, or the soul-expanding possibilities of the creative life. While her characterizations can be overdrawn, especially those of the Kiplings, and the narrative oddly paced, the confident empathy of Vinton’s writing moves the story beyond its weak spots.
Another novel about a novelist, but radiantly colored, sensuous, respectful and rapt; an impressive debut.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-149-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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
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