![]() 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. A good book to travel with.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Percy was that rarest of creatures, an educated gentleman, a true man of the humanities like the bourbon he writes about, he has a complex, heady flavor all his own. ![]() Always, Percy strives to keep in balance a very real spiritual talent, the abstract theories of science in which he was trained (as a doctor), and the precise, forgiving sense of human frailty in which the best southern writing is grounded. ![]() It does not have the brooding elegance of his best fiction, but it has a stubborn integrity and a sense of the future. This is diligent, unassuming writing, always as clear and simple as the subject will allow, and sometimes deadly. The title of his 1957 essay "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry" is prescient, as are his queries into a profession that has since splintered in all directions. He writes about science, linguistics, literature, and the South, in ascending order of success, and while he is no threat to Chomsky and his successors, his essay on bourbon puts him up there with Flann O'Brien on the subject of whiskey. He wrote novels with plenty of thought-content, and his nonfiction has plenty of storytelling. The nonfiction has a droll, dry, carefully laid-back honesty that shares something important with such masters of American English as Russell Baker, James Thurber, and Mark Twain but Percy can also be as intense as Graham Greene in the earnestness of his Catholicism. His observation that the purpose of the novel is to give pleasure can be applied to this work as well. Percy was a quintessentially American writer with a voice of his own that was never compromised. A pungent, revealing collection of lectures, essays, and interviews-some previously published in Harper's, The Georgia Review, etc.-by the late novelist (d.
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