"You have longings, the male Eros does that to you; you take the sexual path and it leads you into lewdness, lewdness opens up into insanity, a world of madness rushes at you full face." This, for narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg, 35, assistant prof of Russian literature, is the "pain schedule," the "unique ordeal" for brainy, refined men in 20th-century America: men with "the privilege of vision," men with no "gift"—but lots of yearning—for love and sex. And Bellow's new novel—Kenneth's rambling, often richly comic monologue—details the agonies that come when two such men insist on seeking love (in a world where Eros is debased) instead of settling for exquisite isolation. Kenneth's primary focus is on his beloved Uncle Berm, renowned botanist and esteemed professor at a Midwestern university, a man of epic mind and soul: "He had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere." So, despite protective maneuvers by Kenneth, widower Benn has recently fallen into "a succession of sexual miseries": seduction by an alcoholic divorcee neighbor; near-entrapment by a freaked-out, jet-setting former beauty; and now—impetuous marriage to "glittering, nervous" Matilda Layamon, social-climbing daughter of a rich, crass local doctor. Living with his pushy new in-laws in their palatial duplex, passive Berm is out-of-place, cut off from his resonating plant-world. Matilda—whose allure has always had a menacing aspect (her wide, thin shoulders remind Berm of Tony Perkins in Psycho drag)—spends half the day asleep, the other half planning her grand salon (with Benn as social bait). Worst of all, the greedy Layamons prod Benn—against all his finer instincts—into raking up an old family quarrel: Great-Uncle Vilitzer (a corrupt city power-broker, now 80, ill, in legal trouble) once cheated Benn and his sister (Kenneth's mother) out of a real-estate fortune. While recounting Benn's degradation (and ultimate escape), however, Kenneth also broods on his own turmoil as the unsexy, academic son of "a father with a world-historical cock." Kenneth's ex-girlfriend lives in Seattle with their child, spurning his obsessed wooing, preferring rough-stuff lovers. Meanwhile, since women too "die of heartbreak," Kenneth's platonic friend Dita (who has bad skin) undergoes awful plastic surgery in an attempt to increase her desirability to him. The provocative socio-sexual ideas on display throughout—the brain/body split (cf. Bellow's story "Cousins"), the futility of love, the "fallen state" of humankind—don't hold up well under incessant repetition without development; Kenneth—part authorial alter-ego, part figure-of-fun (pompous and prim)—is an unsatisfying novel-length narrator, ambiguous yet flat. Often, in fact, this seems to be a dense short-story or two, stretched out to 336 pages—winding down to mild denouements (which are heavily foreshadowed) instead of barreling towards them. (All too aptly, Kenneth likens his speculations to "a stationary bicycle.") Still, there are great chunks of fine, funny Bellovian rhetoric here (that aphoristic blend of scholar and stand-up), along with enough sporadic narrative zing—amused, appalled vignettes worthy of a Jewish-American Balzac—to compensate readers for the longueurs and overall puffiness.
Pub Date: June 15, 1987
ISBN: 0142437743
Page Count: -
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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