Despite some flaws, a worthy novel about the lost hopes and embraced hypocrisies of a self-absorbed, overhyped generation.
A debut novel about two old school pals who reunite to reminisce and confront demons past and present.
Rogers starts this novel off with a bang, with the shooting of a suicide bomber in Iraq, where Jonathan Adams, earnest boyhood friend of the narrator, Tom Walker, works as a civilian contractor spreading “the democracy gospel.” Adams returns home to the U.S., and though he’s a successful college professor and state senator, his friend Walker sees he’s profoundly chagrined and disillusioned—despite the two having grown up on Byron’s Lane in a freshly plowed subdivision of Maplewood, Ohio, the once-small town transformed during their childhood into a seemingly golden middle-class suburbia. Adams, Walker discerns, is “incapable” in his own life though “abundantly blessed” at managing others. Ominously, Adams has bought a house that’s been the scene of a series of unfortunate events, including a bullet that whizzed by his head. Adams writes it off as a wild shot by a teenage hunter, but when he begins to get strange phone calls, Walker starts to wonder. Are terrorists to blame? A whodunit undercurrent runs through the novel, though it’s largely a book of manners and discussions between two old chums as they relive their past, review botched relationships and share the shame of their youth, like when they harassed an aged local farmer done in by suburbanization and didn’t help him when he collapsed from a heart attack. Rogers’ novel has much to say about the lost promise of the babied baby boomer generation—its greed, angst, sense of entitlement, narcissism and duplicity. “It’s our generation’s moment—it’s our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define ourselves. And we’re squandering it,” laments Adams, a kind of latter-day Hubert Humphrey, the last shred of America’s dying liberal class. Rogers nicely evokes suburban anomie and angst. Occasionally, however, stilted dialogue and overwrought metaphors weaken the book: “The big, bad wolf is here and I’m the pig who built his house with straw,” Adams tells Walker. Still, much of the writing is workmanlike and sometimes even better. One bad guy is “a mouse of a boy who grew into a rat of a man.”
Despite some flaws, a worthy novel about the lost hopes and embraced hypocrisies of a self-absorbed, overhyped generation.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1626521315
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Langdon Street Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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