Odd and oddly charming.
Kinky hijinks rattle teacups among the British bourgeoisie in the latest from Bennett (The Uncommon Reader, 2008, etc.).
The book consists of two stories, “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” and “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes.” While no more a hottie than Margaret Thatcher, widowed, cash-strapped 55-year-old Mrs. Donaldson rents out a bedroom in her home to a young couple. Her daughter’s skeptical—“The first condom in the loo…and she’ll soon change her tune”—but student lodgers Laura and Andy are presentable. This proves crucial, when, behind on rent, they present Mrs. D. with barter—a presentation of themselves, feckless, doing the deed. My heavens! Even more so, when she finds herself agreeing. But things have changed since hubby (“an unobjectionable man”) departed, and Mrs. D. is spreading her wings. For one thing, she’s taken a job at the hospital, enacting, for doctors-in-training, roles of ill patients, and when the part demands disrobing, she discovers a curious willingness. Soon she’s hooked on the in-house freak show; when L. and A. depart, she mourns its loss. She gets on with life, though, perhaps a tad wiser…and warmer. In Bennett’s next tale, Betty is smitten with fiancé Graham Forbes, dashing, doting and younger, but seems in no way wise to something awkward: He’s gay (he spends the night before his nuptials with a boy named Gary). The Forbes folks initially pooh-pooh the match (they suspect she’s Catholic!), but Graham, who’d married for money, in time startles himself by actually liking Betty: She’s sharp, funny and understanding, and, with his sweetheart, the novelty even of hetero-sex is nice. Eventually, Graham’s secret comes out—as do others (“Mr. Forbes still from time to time sleeps with his daughter-in-law and leads a vigorous fantasy life on the internet…”), but the Betty/Graham union continues satisfying. While the message in these bagatelles isn’t clear, it probably has to do with acceptance.
Odd and oddly charming.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00316-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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