A precise and moving evocation both of a vanishing lifestyle and of the liberating power of faith.
An elegiac celebration of the redemptive power of love and community, by the prolific poet, novelist, and essayist.
This tenth work of fiction by Berry is set, like most of its predecessors (A World Lost, 1996, etc.), in the fictional precincts of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most richly imagined communities in contemporary fiction. Jayber Crow, the town barber for over thirty years, beginning in the 1930s, offers a first-person recollection both of the town's quiet communal pleasures and of the efforts of its hardworking, and often hard-pressed, farmers to secure some measure of personal happiness. Their struggles are made somewhat easier by the unspoken but profound sense of community that most in Port William share, a commitment to support each other through the hard patches of life without calling attention to the help being given or taken. Jayber, an orphan and an outsider, is more aware of the complex interdependence of families and friends than most. His barbershop is a focal point of local society, a place in which many come to relax, to exchange or confirm news, and to share gossip. And Jayber, cordial but closemouthed, becomes a confidant—and confessor—to many. While the leisurely narrative is in part Jayber's recollections of the everyday patterns and intermittent sorrows of the community, it is also the record of the impossible love Jayber harbors, for most of his adult life, for Maggie, a warm, intelligent woman married to the hustling, manipulative Troy Cheatham. Berry's work has often displayed an interest in the nature and effect of religious faith. That interest takes center stage here. Jayber's love for Maggie, rather than corroding his character because it can never be expressed, leads him to a serene faith, which meets its greatest test as Port William is overcome by the modern world (farms fail, families fray and disperse, and the ubiquitous developers move in) and Maggie becomes mortally ill. Jayber's hard-won acceptance of loss offers a compelling and—by contemporary standards—quite unusual climax.
A precise and moving evocation both of a vanishing lifestyle and of the liberating power of faith. (Author tour)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-029-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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