The author of the well-received first novel Mohawk (1986), a long soap opera set in a decaying mill town in upstate New York, here returns to that setting with a father-son drama that spans several decades. With an unerring sense of place, the book transcends some soapiness of its own and breathes life into its small-town types. Ned Hall tells the story of his father Sam, who is at the very bottom of the autoinsurance risk pool; of his mother Jenny, who breaks down after her lover, a priest, leaves her at the communion rail; and of the assorted citizens of Mohawk, ranging from suicidal adolescents and battered drunks to well-to-do philanderers and a solicitous attorney. Sam is the most memorable character, a classic rogue and no-account who appears in his son's life at will until Jenny breaks down. Ned moves in with his father and receives a young man's classic education into street life in the 50's: he learns how to play pool, how to bet the horses, how to steal and lie—partly from malice and hurt, partly to please others. He witnesses endless fights between his father and Drew, the son of his father's girlfriend. He falls in love with the well-to-do girl on the hill and returns, years later, to become her lover and his father's buddy before leaving again. Drew gets killed, Jenny moves to California with the solicitous lawyer, and Sam gets cancer. Though the book gets baggy with too many long-winded stories about smalltown eccentrics and grotesques, its ending is a powerful epiphany, if a bit forced: Ned's girl has a child at the same time as Sam dies. The seasonal structure here comes full circle. Self-consciously written as an old-fashioned novel, the book creates a time and place with gusto and, by its end, manages to move us.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1988
ISBN: 0679753834
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1988
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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