Neither the pre-publication publicity nor Coover's exuberant word-riffs can conceal the tiny-mindedness behind this rewrite of early-1950s American history as comic-book mytho-fantasy. The "public burning" is the Ethel & Julius Rosenberg electrocution, here transformed into the Times Square vaudeville-rally that everyone—dodo Ike, "Boy Judge" Kaufman, prosecutor Saypol, and folksy, ballsy "Superhero" Uncle Sam himself—is bloodthirstily, Yahoo-istically waiting for. Justice Douglas' stay-of-execution creates a delay: time for the pinko servants of Sam's arch-enemy ("the Phantom!") to march and picket. And time for pathetic, paranoid Veep R. Nixon, who narrates every other chapter, to rehash the case; to detect parallels between the Rosenberg and Nixon family histories; to realize that "Eth" and "Julie" are "taking the rap for somebody else"; and to lose himself in masturbatory fantasies of earthy Ethel. As the execution-day gala commences—public spanking of Douglas, skits based on the Rosenberg Death House Letters by Astaire & Rogers, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers—Nixon rushes to Sing-Sing for an erotic encounter with Ethel ("Richard, I could eat you in sheer extremity of feeling!"), tries to divert the the death-hungry Times Sq. horde ("everbody "drop his pants for America!"), precipitates an apocalyptic mob scene, and—after the electrocutions take place as scheduled—is initiated into America's power elite via sodomy by Uncle Sam: a "rendyvoos with destiny ain't no beanbag!" As a novella (the author's original intent), this ingenious scenario would flare, stun, and leave its mark. But Coover's inflationary technique—reduce to a one-liner and then free-associate, allude, and expand like crazy—belabors and betrays the essential gimcrack design. The tone of righteous sarcasm becomes a drone. Chunks of the public record are jazzily ornamented and tossed in. Juicy zingers about TIME and the N.Y. Times are whipped into the consistency of poured concrete. With no human moorings (for all the psycho-portraiture, RMN never graduates from gimmick to character), Coover skids between easy-target satire (Bruce, Sahl, et al. were there first) and melodramatic grandstanding, with no new insights worthy of his remarkable rhetorical talents. A provocative kernel lost in a dazzling, deadening morass: precisely the kind of book more likely to be talked about than read.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1977
ISBN: 0802135277
Page Count: 564
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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