Sitcom characters, lame jokes, weak plot.
Ho-hum debut about a runaway mom who ends up in a rural diner.
Juanita Lewis, a 41-one-year-old African-American, has had it with her feckless offspring: son Rashawn is a drug dealer, other son Randy is in prison for aggravated assault, and daughter Bertie neglects her baby, Teishia. Juanita escapes by reading romances and dreaming of a better life for her family, but it seems like none of them ain’t never going to get out of the Columbus, Ohio, projects—until Juanita quits her nursing job, packs a bag, and hops a bus to get as far away from her troubles as possible. She decides to stop in a tiny Montana town called Paper Moon, where she spots a Help Wanted sign in the window of a diner, breezes into the kitchen, and pretty much takes over. The indignant owner, Jess Gardiner, calls in the seven-foot sheriff, who sizes up the situation and asks Juanita to rustle him up a real breakfast of bacon, eggs, and pancakes, instead of that citified cuisine Jess has been serving. Her skill at down-home cooking wins everyone over in a Montana minute (about three weeks), including lesbian long-haul trucker Penelope Bradshaw, a.k.a. Peaches. Juanita confides her desire to write the story of her life, and Peaches is duly encouraging, introducing her to Millie, an eccentric old lady who rents out rooms in her rambling Victorian house. Millie’s named her numerous cats after her ex-husbands and talks to them all—a habit Juanita soon falls into. Well, there isn’t a hell of a lot else to do in Paper Moon, until strong and silent Jess starts romancing her in his quiet way. He’s nothing like the abusive and irresponsible men who fathered her three good-for-nothing children, and Juanita is ready for love, if not a commitment. Her brief taste of freedom has emboldened her, and the open road beckons. What’s next—California? Mexico?
Sitcom characters, lame jokes, weak plot.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45930-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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