Nothing clarifies and focuses a superior first novel like its successor: all the cells of the former are stained by the latter's stresses, repetitions; and a pattern ought to start to emerge. Well, that's happened here—and the news is that Birdy was no fluke. Wharton has a real theme—the joys and abysmal pain of containing alternate realities within one life—and he has the continued means to bring it across powerfully. In Birdy, the wish to be a bird inhabited a boy; in Dad, the desire to have lived a better, different life floods through the consciousness of an old man under great stress. Narrating is John Tremont, Jr., 52, a painter who lives in Paris and is called back to southern California when his mother has a series of serious heart attacks. A frightened, fragile, high-strung, and domineering woman, Mom can't stand her invalidism. And when the far gentler Dad suddenly takes ill too-bladder tumors—and begins to abruptly fail (the sudden onset of horrifying senility and coma), John Jr. is in the custodial role of helplessly overseeing his parents' degeneration—that trauma which all adults fear and are loath to consider. (Complicating the situation is the arrival of John's own son, dropped-out from college, who puts him into a double bind of generations forward and back: how can he be a father if, at 52, he's so concerned but ultimately ineffectual a son?) This far along, then, Wharton has been providing a grimly specific, daily, realistic portrait of the horrors of oldness and dying: the dealing with incontinence, with unfeeling doctors, the impatience, the being constantly on-call, the irreversibility of the decline. And then, about mid-way, miraculously, Dad pulls out of his senile coma and seems to recover completely. In fact, he becomes more alive than ever: spry, mischievous, randy, creative, antic—a Pan far more spirited than the already scared-witless and emotionally costive Mom can bear. Even worse for her, Dad now admits to a lifelong feeling of having had another, near-duplicate life and family across the country—in Cape May, New Jersey! Delusion? Possibility? As Dad's freedom, real or imagined, is quickly beaten back into insensateness and eventual death by Mom, we watch this lovely flicker being snuffed out. And as incontestably awful and frightening as such a common situation is—death of spirit by family, that is—Wharton invests it with a hint of yearning and mirage simply by piling one plain, real occurrence atop another: he's a superb fabulist, we're learning, of the mundane, American, no-frills existence. True, alternating chapters narrated by Tremont's son, meant as a foil, don't really work (just as the double narrator in parts of Birdy didn't)—but this is only a minor flaw. So: a major novel from a writer whose magnitude has now been gloriously confirmed—in a haunting book full of pain and misery, but one which (thanks to Wharton's method, skill, and vista) you have to be reminded to be depressed over.
Pub Date: May 28, 1981
ISBN: 155704256X
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1981
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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