Works of art may overcome the living here, but artifice and insufferable blather do the job on its reader.
Reduced to a shadow of his former self in imitating Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Self (How the Dead Live, 2000) vaults into life’s viscera to lampoon England’s upper crust while skipping across the art/drug/gay culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dorian Gray this time around is initially the independently wealthy plaything of a video-installation artist, Baz, whose work Cathode Narcissus, with its iterated imagery of Dorian in the buff, is the combined product of Baz’s drooling passion for his subject and of a drug-laced modeling session. But Baz’s aristo friend and drug benefactor Henry Wotton also takes a guiding hand in Dorian’s development, and in the process a lascivious monster is born. Dionysian debaucheries consume Wotton and his coterie, culminating in a party to celebrate Baz’s installation, now in Dorian’s house, at which Herman, a homeless black hunk Dorian fancies, is so thoroughly used that he immediately goes back to his squat and ODs. A decade later, Baz, Wotton, and Dorian are all HIV-positive, the first two having already started their death spirals. Dorian, however, is still in the lip-smacking bloom of his youth (although something uncanny is happening to his image on the Narcissus videotapes); as Baz visits Wotton in a London AIDS ward, he recounts his adventures with Dorian in 1980s Manhattan, where the golden boy became the toast of the town while Baz kicked his drug habit. Dorian reenters their lives at a dinner party soon thereafter, but that same night Baz is butchered by the man he adored. Other grisly murders follow, as Dorian fights to protect his secret, but Wotton lingers on against all odds. He finally succumbs, though—leaving behind the manuscript that was the novel thus far, a work that triggers a startling transformation in Dorian when it comes into his hands.
Works of art may overcome the living here, but artifice and insufferable blather do the job on its reader.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1729-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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