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THE LOVE OF MY YOUTH

Despite the elegant prose Gordon fans expect, both Miranda’s self-consciousness and Adam’s smugness infect the author,...

After recently publishing more nonfiction (Reading Jesus, 2009, etc.), Gordon (The Stories of Mary Gordon, 2006, etc.) returns to the novel form in this examination of first love revisited.

Miranda is an epidemiologist in her late 50s living in Berkley. Alone in Rome after a conference, she is invited to a dinner party where she talks to her high-school and college sweetheart Adam for the first time since they broke up in their 20s. Adam, who once had soaring musical ambitions but now teaches music at a private school, is in Rome with his musically gifted 18-year-old daughter, who has a grant to study there. The question of rekindling their old affair smolders but never ignites. Both are happily married: Miranda to an Israeli doctor with whom she’s raised two sons; Adam to his much younger second wife, the mother of his daughter—his first wife, the cause of his rift with Miranda, committed suicide. With time on their hands, Miranda and Adam agree to meet for daily walks. Each chapter takes place in a park or at one of Rome’s beautiful and historic sights, where the former lovers eat a lot of ice cream and delicious Italian meals. But any travelogue quality is eclipsed by ever so serious discourse between the two as they ruminate on the nature of youth and age, on their different approaches to life, on whether the perfect love they shared slipped away through missteps or because it was not meant to last. The daughter of WASP privilege, Miranda has always been an idealistic political activist, aware but unable to overcome her tendency toward self-righteous political correctness. From working-class Italian immigrant stock, Adam committed his life to music from an early age, and, despite his own disappointments, he remains slightly otherworldly and a bit haughty about his aesthetic sensitivity.

Despite the elegant prose Gordon fans expect, both Miranda’s self-consciousness and Adam’s smugness infect the author, causing the novel and its characters to remain slightly off-putting.

Pub Date: April 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-37742-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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CIRCE

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

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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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