Less ambitious and satisfying than Auster's last two novels (In The Country of Last Things, Moon Palace), this equally improbable tale seems a bit hastily conceived, with too many blurry edges and no compelling center to keep things in focus. Jim Nashe, a 33-year-old Boston firefighter down on his luck, decides to give his life over to chance. In rapid order, his wife walks out on him and their two-year-old daughter; he inherits $200,000 from a father he hasn't seen in 30 years; he leaves his daughter with his sister in Minnesota; and he begins zigzagging across America in a brandnew Saab. With less than $20,000 left, the rambling Nashe picks up a hitchhiker ("A wiry little runt") named Jack "Jackpot" Pozzi—a traveling poker pro and fellow member of, as he calls it, "The International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs." Jim becomes partners with Jack, staking him in a match with two eccentric, lottery-winning millionaires in remote Pennsylvania. An "atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust" hovers over their strange estate, where one works on his visionary model of a city and the other houses a vast collection of historical ephemera ("a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness"). In their ultimate game of chance, the young partners lose all, and then some, becoming virtual slaves of the obnoxious rich men. Soon Jim and Jack are plunged into a world of backbreaking labor and arbitrary authority, until Jack is beaten senseless for trying to escape, and Jim becomes "crazy with loneliness," a prisoner in his "private hell." When Jim wins his final freedom, he celebrates with an unpredictable act of violence that affirms his assumption of control. But by this point, the novel has abandoned dramatic plausibility for some elusive, abstract notions about randomness and personal responsibility. Auster's in thrall to an idea here, and the more traditional aspects of narrative (plot, character, etc.) suffer as a consequence; without being redeemed by alternative ones. Despite some intrigue, a disappointing work.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0140154078
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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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