Pure

September 24, 2012
In another exploration of historical lacunae, Miller (Ingenious Pain) delves into pre-Revolutionary Paris, where a pestilential, ancient cemetery acts as metaphor for the blighted reign of King Louis XVI. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young Norman engineer who prides himself on his faculties of reason, is commissioned by the king's minister to close the centuries-old les Innocents cemetery, whose noxious sprawl threatens to poison adjacent neighborhoods. Jean-Baptiste moves in nearby and begins orchestrating the massive exhumation, hiring miners to dig up the thousands of bodies and cart away the bones. Among those whose lives will be changed by his commission are Jean-Baptiste's friend Armand, the organist at les Innocents' church; and Héloïse, a literate prostitute, who becomes his mistress. But as the digging commences, unexpected complications arise: risk of cave-ins, infection, rats, bats, madness, fire, and the special danger posed by his landlords' vengeful daughter, Ziguette. Despite all obstacles, Jean-Baptiste forges on with his ghoulish task, but at what cost to reason? Although the book's dramas fail to coalesce, Miller recreates pre-Revolutionary Paris with astonishing verisimilitude, and through Jean-Baptiste, illuminates the years preceding le deluge. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta.

April 15, 2012
From the opening pages of his new novel, Miller (Oxygen, 2002; One Morning Like a Bird, 2008) virtually steeps you in the filth, fashion, and fecundity of late-eighteenth-century France. In 1785, as prerevolutionary Paris teeters on the brink of a political and cultural cataclysm, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer fresh from the provinces, is assigned the dubious task of exhuming the pestilential Les Innocents cemetery. Situated in the heart of one of the city's poorest quarters, the ancient burial ground is literally bursting at the seams, spewing poisonous vapors and noxious odors, not to mention decomposing body parts, into the surrounding neighborhood. He approaches his task with the scientific zeal characteristic of Enlightenment-era intellectuals, but both his grisly mission and his philosophical musings about the nature of man and his own position in unfolding history foreshadow the violent social upheaval to come. Atmospheric to the point that Paris has never looked, sounded, or smelled as gritty or as gory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)