Next book

THE FINISHING SCHOOL

Another perfect little novel of manners from the ever-wondrous Spark (Aiding and Abetting, 2001, etc.): a microcosm of the...

At 82, Dame Spark brings yet again a brimming supply of wit, drollery, understatement, and plain human interest to a tale—this one about changing sexual alliances in a tiny private school in Europe.

Rowland Mahler, 29, and his wife, Nina Parker, 26, are the founders, managers, and faculty of College Sunrise, the little school that from time to time they move from one European location to another, partly for cachet but partly for the convenience of leaving certain debts behind. Right now, the school has nine students, aged sixteen and up, each supported by well-off parents and each made touching, memorable, or amusing by the merest stroke or two of the Sparkian brush. Still, as Nina teaches her “Etiquette” course and Rowland carries on with his popular creative writing class (one reason for creating College Sunrise was so Rowland could write a novel), one student does come more to the forefront, and that’s Chris Wiley, only 18 but—troublingly indeed for the increasingly envious Rowland—visibly gifted as a writer. Worse than just being talented, Chris, unlike the badly blocked Rowland, is cruising right along with his own first novel—on Mary, Queen of Scots—and even getting some attention from publishers and movie people, fickle as they may prove to be. As the school year moves forward amid various perfections of detail, atmosphere, and event—field trips, fashion shows, hotel dances, sometimes even classes—the real story lies in Rowland’s obsessive envy of Chris and his jealousy-induced breakdown (Rowland actually stays at a monastery for a bit, trying to recover), events followed by one delicately done twist after another as a marriage fails, another comes about, and the Chris–Rowland “problem” is resolved in a most unexpected way.

Another perfect little novel of manners from the ever-wondrous Spark (Aiding and Abetting, 2001, etc.): a microcosm of the world we live in, constructed with wizardry, delicacy, sharp eye, and huge heart.

Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004

ISBN: 0-385-51282-1

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

Categories:
Next book

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

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

Next book

HOUSE OF LEAVES

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

Categories:
Close Quickview