by Dianne Warren ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2012
The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely...
Winner of the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Warren’s U.S. debut limns two nights and a single summer day in a tiny Canadian town.
In spare, quietly lyrical prose, Warren tracks the inhabitants of several households in Juliet (population 1,011). Lee Torgeson, 26, isn’t sure he’s capable of managing the farm left to him by his adoptive parents. Willard Shoenfeld and his brother’s widow, Marian, share a home and continue to run the Desert Drive-In movie theater, but Willard is afraid Marian is planning to leave; he can’t admit to himself how much he loves her, and he’s unaware she shares those feelings. Blaine Dolson has lost most of his family’s farmland and faces bankruptcy; he’s maddened by the distracted, easygoing ways of wife Vicki, who seems to let their six children mostly run wild. Blaine is only one of the borrowers whose on-the-brink finances worry tenderhearted banker Norval Birch, who is also troubled by wife Lila’s plans for an elaborate wedding for their pregnant daughter Rachelle. Add to this mix an out-of-towner who has lost the Arabian horse she impulsively bought en route to see her formerly estranged daughter and the grandchildren she’s never met; good-natured trucker Hank Trass, who takes her cell number and promises to keep an eye out; his jealous wife, Lynn, who finds the number and is sure Hank is cheating; plus the local hairdresser, whose cousin stabbed his own mother and whose father is a drunk—it adds up to the traditional cast of quirky characters that frequently animate tales of small-town life. Warren gives it her own twist with humor as dry as the sand dunes of the Little Snake Hills that border Juliet and with gentle compassion for her characters, who have their share of troubles but are all essentially decent, caring folks.
The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely rhythms, most will find this an engaging snapshot of rural life.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15799-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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