Sorrentino's first novel erects a complex structure for what is ultimately a simple premise: that rock-and-roll in the 1980's reflected the decade's greed and ambition. Rather than tell a straightforward tale of a typical eighties band, Sorrentino layers his text with all kinds of pretentious technique. The structural conceit relies on a parallel to sound recording. Each section of the novel is meant to resemble another track, creating—yes, he alludes to it—a Rashomon effect. In this drab work, though, the result is cacophony. Even Rashomon stuck to only four points of view, but Sorrentino gives everyone a voice, and their visions of what really happened are so disparate that you have to wonder whether they aren't all candidates for the bin. At the narrative's center is a band: Hi-Fi, a punkish, thrash, metal group conceived in the early 80's by some well-heeled children of Manhattan liberal-bohemian parents. After an affectless, unembellished account of their first night in a midtown dive, Sorrentino layers on ``dubs,'' including a set of footnotes to the first section. The first ``solo'' is by a pretentious twit whose pompous diction reveals his contempt for everything related to rock. This bad bit of Nabokov is followed by nine more versions of the band's history, some claiming they lasted only that single evening, others recounting their rise to commercial fame. Each section reflects the style and worldview of the teller (e.g., one lovestruck groupie tells her tale in the breathless prose of a romance novel). By the end, few are likely to care whether the last section is in fact the most likely to be true. A bloodless narrative that reads like a notebook for a novel, an exercise in style, or an academic deconstruction of rock culture—none of which has enough to do with the pulse of the music itself.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-073-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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