Emotionally complex, politically intelligent, beautifully written: Among the best from a novelist in the classic American...
In a small city north of Boston in the late ’60s, a boy expands his horizons even as he discovers the enduring strength of “loyalty to a neighborhood and affection for a family—those twin steel bonds of the working class”—in Merullo’s elegiac fourth novel, a companion to Revere Beach Boulevard (1998).
Anthony Benedetto looks back on his youth in Revere, Massachusetts, from the vantage of middle age in rural Vermont, where he is a modestly successful portrait painter. Tonio is only 11 when his parents die in a plane crash; he’s raised by his gentle, reflective grandfather and strong, serene grandmother, who temper his early introduction to life’s existential uncertainty with their personal examples of loving devotion to duty, work, and kin. His anxious, edgy uncle Peter, a Golden Gloves boxer who retreated back to the neighborhood after losing a crucial bout, reminds him how confining their world can be. Peter’s daughter Rosalie is Tonio’s close friend, but she pushes him away in adolescence, when Tonio’s good grades and hockey skills take him to Exeter while Rosalie remains in the tough local high school, running around with its meanest creep. Tonio feels comfortable enough among Exeter’s privileged students, though he and his African-American roommate are drawn especially close by their ambiguous relationship with the less fortunate folks back home now that they’ve “gone off and joined the oppressor.” Despite a suicide attempt, a lingering death, and references to several future bad ends, the narrator’s tone is rueful and meditative rather than anguished. Most writers begin with their coming-of-agers, but Merullo was wise to wait. His artistic maturity gives us a tale of sentiment without sentimentality as he conveys the inevitability of loss and the divisions of class with sadness but not bitterness.
Emotionally complex, politically intelligent, beautifully written: Among the best from a novelist in the classic American tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61032-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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