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. 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. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. This is a novel that doesn't really try to make you believe in it, or in much of anything, including cause and effect.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Against his usual impulses, he acts on those pleas: “So that I might…redeem myself?” He doesn’t believe in redemption or a redeemer.
Telephone book series#
Yet, in a plot device that might be called a deus ex machina, Zach receives a series of handwritten pleas for help in the pockets of clothing that he buys on eBay. It is “unusually progressive,” terminal, and there is no cure. The focus seems to narrow on the family, and the daughter in particular, who apparently starts to suffer from a rare disease that causes partial blindness, seizures, dementia, and death. Having introduced the elements of his plot, Zach sees the tenure case resolve itself in a shocking manner, and the flirtatious student simply disappears from the narrative. So, this is really a story about storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, the way we shape them, and the way they shape our lives. “The truth was, I didn’t know which end was the beginning or whether the middle was in the true middle or nearer to that end or the other.” It's hard for the reader to find it interesting to be living inside Zach's head, since Zach doesn't find it very interesting.
“So often our stories begin at their ends,” he explains in the middle of establishing these plot details. He initially deflects the pleas for support from a colleague making her tenure bid and the attentions of a student who seems to be flirting with him.
His love for his daughter would appear to be the main thing holding his loveless marriage together. He lives a very narrow life on automatic pilot, introducing himself as a man of “profound and yawning dullness.” He finds teaching to be rote he considers his scientific research and publication to be all but pointless. A family tragedy inspires a professor to an act of heroism with strangers.Īt the opening of the latest novel by the prolific, eclectic Everett ( So Much Blue, 2017, etc.), first-person narrator Zach Wells doesn’t seem like someone who is likely to put himself on the line for others.
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