An engaging allegorical pursuit of the mirage that is beauty’s transcendence.
McCabe’s literary fiction debut reimagines Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, setting it in glimmering Southern California.
With novels and a bit of poetry to his name, Jameson Frame is a writer, PBS-famous rather than a celebrity best-seller. Heir to an Upper East Side townhouse among other trifles, Frame wants not for money. Out for a walk one November day, "yet another cold, gray morning in a long string of cold gray mornings," Frame contemplates Herman Melville: "I quietly take to the sea." Those musings end with a decision to fly to Venice, Calif. McCabe writes no heavy, dense drama; his gift is constructing intriguing characters to remodel Thomas Mann’s original Death in Venice. In flight, the staid, prissily refined Frame meets Tobin, an effeminate man processed by plastic surgery, and his boy-toy, Kyle. In Venice, Frame encounters Elsa and Vera, exotic bohemian housemates fond of Tarot and wine-and-marijuana infused parties, and Chase, a skateboarding nude-and-underwear model, the "perfection of the human form." Frame’s lured from his circumscribed life by Venice’s sun-drenched hedonism, and any pretense that Frame’s appreciation of Chase is purely aesthetic fades away as Chase becomes "the object of his love and lust." In this homoerotic paean, there’s much symbolism—Frame’s first purchase after arriving at the luxurious hotel is a pair of $300 sunglasses from a beach kiosk, as if this new world blinds him with "the sheer volume of possibilities." Later, with Vera’s, Elsa’s and Chase's encouragement, Frame’s plied with Masculane, Botox and "tumescent liposuction" to set off his new wardrobe of baggy, long swimsuits, matching hooded jackets and soft leather flip-flops. Chase operates a website for "Chasers," men who subscribe to his erotic "art," and he entices Frame, ever self-flagellating in his comparisons, to film erotic video episodes for the Chasers—beguiling debauchery that promises more than Chase is capable of giving.
An engaging allegorical pursuit of the mirage that is beauty’s transcendence.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57962-352-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
