Percy's fifth novel is tightly bound to the theme of his other four: Why is a person nowadays "two percent of himself"? Why are we all so unhappy? And it's most especially and clearly linked to his second (and perhaps best) book, The Last Gentleman. Here, grown older and incomparably richer (having married a cheerful, fat, crippled heiress who died), is again Will Barrett—who's still having spells and blacking out ("petty-mall" attacks, his doctor/golf-partner calls them). But now Will is coming out of those spells into a reality that includes the 30 or 40 million dollars he has; a grown, born-again daughter; and the slowly sharpening, interweaving memory of his father, on a hunting trip with boy Will, trying to kill them both on purpose. Then—to complement Will's abstracted search for what the hell it all comes out to—Percy brings on Allie, a girl in her twenties (who is later revealed as the daughter of Will's old flame from The Last Gentleman, Kitty). Allie, shock-treated and not about to be zapped again, has escaped from a sanitarium and taken shelter in an abandoned North Carolina greenhouse adjacent to Will's property. There's not much that she can remember about the business of the world—how to talk to people, for instance—but she gets along with the help of elemental physics (blocks, hoists, and tackles are needed to fix up the greenhouse) and conundrum-like speech that only Will, when they accidentally meet, seems to understand and appreciate. Two slates, then: one overfilled (Will), one about empty (Allie)—and Percy takes it gleefully from there. As with any Percy novel, the wealths here are almost humbling: the spookily precise descriptions of odd physical sensations; the satire on the complacent and dead modern South; the rage and the Kierkegaardian comic curiosity. ("The present day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.') True, there are sections in which these not-always-meshing attributes go on too long, saved only by Percy's enormous charm as a stylist; it's a generally slow book, wide-seamed. And the lack of any great advance in characterization does not lend a what-comes-next? anticipation. But this is Percy, our cool Dostoevsky, totally at his leisure (as he wasn't in Lancelot), more personal than ever before (the father-son flashbacks are fine)—and, page for page, there's more acute fiction and better prose here than you're likely to find anywhere else in American writing today.
Pub Date: July 7, 1980
ISBN: 0312243243
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
