What I need is a master guide to the wisdom, an exclusive service in the ideal location of the world, say, where you give all your money and all you ever hope to have, and in return you receive a generosity of beneficent hygienically balanced natural unradiated lifelight and you get to live and write a minimum hundred and fifty years, give or take a decade, and the cock never fails you." So writes Jonathan, Doctorow's angst-ridden alter ego in the title novella here, as he begins his free-associative ramble through the social, sexual, and political twitchings of a middle-aged N.Y. writer. Jonathan, spending more and more time away from his fastidious Connecticut wife, holing up in a Soho studio, contemplates all the crumbling marriages around them, "the phenomenon of the neither married nor divorced but no longer entirely together . . . I see the small spaces men end up with for their lives, and there is terror, and the disgusted reproach of children, and the lapse into dereliction of men who have taken down their establishements, and I know I risk all that." He broods on death, immigration, the subways, his health, crime, the CIA, aging, artists' careers, his long-dead father, Rilke's androgyny, his own iffy affair with a jet-hopping, independent woman ("CIA cunt"), the fates of Wilhelm Reich, Linus Pauling, Bishop Pike. And, providing a slender narrative thread, there's a moral/political decision for Jonathan to make: should he or shouldn't he provide illegal sanctuary to rebel fugitives from El Salvador? (He should: "Look, my country, what you've done to me, what I have to do to live with myself.") Throughout, there's a fundamental sentimentality beneath Doctorow's dour, sardonic observations and anecdotes; the attempts to churn up an eclectic socio-cultural swirl around one writer's psyche sometimes reads like pale-imitation Mailer, an artificial gathering of notebook jottings. (At least two images or anecdotes appear, in nearly identical form, in other stories here.) Still, with enough basic material for a humdrum middle-aged-writer novel compressed into 60 dense pages, this is an undeniably lively and varied mosaic, shards of existential anguish side by side with tidbits of literary gossip and mini-editorials. And, while five of the shorter pieces are Doctorow at his most labored and schematic (studies in sexual psychopathology, a fable/history of the American outcast-type), "The Writer in the Family" is a plain, affecting memoir of writer Jonathan as a Bronx teenager—stunned by his father's death, making discoveries about his parents' marriage, using his writing ability to sustain (and then destroy) family myths. In sum: a slight collection, lacking a distinctive voice—but with modest rewards for Doctorow's more cerebral and/or political admirers.
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1984
ISBN: 0812981189
Page Count: 147
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1984
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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