Not much happens in Hermitage, for all its length. But readers should enjoy eavesdropping, especially on the philosopher’s...
A love letter of sorts to the leading “philosophe” of the Enlightenment, as well as an urbane satire on the pretensions and absurdities of academe.
This tenth (and last) novel by the accomplished writer-critic, who died last year at the age of 68, consists of two alternating plots, one set in 1773, the other 220 years later. In the 1993 story, seven latter-day Canterbury pilgrims (including its narrator, an unnamed novelist and teacher who might as well be Bradbury himself) are gathered together for a scholarly enterprise known as the Diderot Project—and travel to Stockholm, then St. Petersburg. The varied group includes an overripe diva, a carpenter, a diplomat, and a skirt-chasing deconstructionist: representatives of Denis Diderot’s wide range of interests. Juxtaposed against their misadventures (which begin on the rundown Vladimir Ilich, the ship conveying them eastward) is the novelist’s imagined reconstruction of Diderot’s own journey to Russia, made at the behest of Empress Catherine the Great (who wants his library)—and of their deliciously witty conversations (presented in play form), in which the philosopher’s passionate libertarian views make little impression on the monarch’s serene political pragmatism. Bradbury attempts parallel discourses in the contemporary sections—but his oblique lampoons of academic double-talk and Boris Yeltsin’s beleaguered tenure are unexceptional (they’re in fact the kind of thing he did better in The History Man, 1975, and the Booker-nominated Rates of Exchange, 1983). Still, the best parts of this awfully overstuffed novel are its most discursive moments. Bradbury had a versatile, interesting mind, and there’s something quite moving about his reverence for the transmission of a broad general culture and his evident belief that the power of an agile, restless mind like Diderot’s can have influence far beyond the reach of political expediency.
Not much happens in Hermitage, for all its length. But readers should enjoy eavesdropping, especially on the philosopher’s attempts to “civilize” the imperturbable Empress. Bradbury’s grave and reverend (at times downright farcical) swan song is one of his most assured and entertaining performances.Pub Date: April 16, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-131-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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