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FACES ALONG THE BAR

Name: FACES ALONG THE BAR
Author: Robert Cranny
ISBN: 1-56649-232-7

by Robert Cranny ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.

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Cranny’s second outing (The Storm, originally published as On Us They Poor Children, not reviewed) explores the disintegrating cohesiveness of an Irish Catholic community in 1957 Brooklyn.

Young Father Darcy gives a sermon preaching inclusiveness that makes him unpopular in a neighborhood already edgy with suspicion and resentment about encroaching change. The Dodgers are threatening to leave Ebbets Field for LA. Italians have already moved in and there are rumors about blacks and Hispanics. Red Dahlgren and his sister Annie, however, both feel stifled by the neighborhood’s narrow-mindedness. Red, a police detective secretly plans to escape to California with his Italian fiancée as soon as he can bring himself to tell his widowed mother. Annie, a high-school senior, dreams of escaping through her college scholarship. Although officially going steady with a luggish neighborhood boy, she is actually having a serious love affair with Toby Walters, the one black kid in her class, who also happens to be athletic and brilliant enough to have earned his own scholarship to Columbia. When Annie is raped and murdered, suspicion falls on Toby, and the crowd at Kerrigan’s bar shows definite mob tendencies. But Red’s buddy Jack Treacy, who returned from Korea emotionally damaged, suspects himself. A hopeless binge drunk, he wakes up the morning after Annie’s death with no memory of the previous night but with a scratched face and bloodied clothes. In guilty panic he goes to Father Darcy, who takes him to the precinct where Red, unbelievably assigned his own sister’s case, and his Jewish partner refuse to consider Treacy’s evidence. They want to believe Toby is guilty, and they have a witness, the unlikable Harry who stole Red’s first girlfriend while Red was in Korea. In a weird twist, the false witness, lying out of weakness, is portrayed as villainous, while the real villain comes across as troubled but basically decent.

Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 1-56649-232-7

Page Count: 308

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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.