Readers may find it hard to make head or tail of this novella—which, believe it or not, may be the secret of its perverse...
A brief novel about an ambitious man that’s different from the usual fare.
Harnisch (Freaks, 2016, etc.) introduces readers to John Marshall (born Juan Marcinal), a young man who’s seduced in the prologue by a prostitute, Chantal. She gives him a picture of Che Guevara, who is, in her view, the archetypal seducer, and encourages John to follow in Che’s footsteps. John, who survived a miserable childhood, means to escape his station in life by seducing well-connected women and winding up at the top of the heap. He’s introduced to Clyde and Maribelle Roman as a tutor to their children and to a woman named Lauren; later, John seduces Maribelle. Also in John’s life are two priest, Father Padric and Father Peter, who help him in his rise. The author seems to be asking readers to see John as a religious figure, but this status is never really made clear. From the Romans, John moves on to the Sinclair family. Mr. Sinclair is a hotel magnate, and John becomes his secretary, aiming to turn himself into a gentleman. John seduces (and impregnates) the Sinclair daughter, Claudia, and then shoots Maribelle before other, unexpected story developments occur. There’s enough plot to fill twice the number of pages in this slim book, but there are also many questions: what’s the significance of the Che Guevara business? What is John’s (or Juan’s) background? Readers aren’t told, and they’re left adrift in so many parts of the narrative that it’s very hard to characterize the story as a whole. It seems to be set in the present day (for example, there are laptop computers), but, on the other hand, there are archaic notes (carriages, a highly structured society) which evoke, perhaps, the 18th century. The end of the book is so Dickensian, in fact, that readers may suspect that it’s a sendup of that style and will wonder if Harnisch has just been teasing them. If readers enjoy that sort of thing, then they will like this.
Readers may find it hard to make head or tail of this novella—which, believe it or not, may be the secret of its perverse charm.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5238-7838-3
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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