An intelligent new voice in fiction yet not an especially persuasive one.
Botany professor, mother, troubled wife, manic gardener—and now an astronaut? Foster’s crammed debut tracks the hectic life of Jessica Frobisher, a woman encountering crises of conscience, loyalty and the heart.
Narrated in emails, most of them written from Jess to Arthur Danielson, her colleague at the University of Michigan and possibly her lover, this multithemed first novel packs a heavy fuel load but never achieves escape velocity. Jess’ full life and fraught marriage come under additional stress following a shuttle disaster at Spaceco, the commercial space flight company where her husband, Liam, works. The explosion kills two crew members and four passengers. Is Liam implicated in a systems-failure coverup? And what about the future of Spaceco now that tycoon Robert Kahn is suing the company for the death of his daughter, one of the passengers, who was pregnant and shouldn’t have been on board? Then there's the ethical issue of charging $250,000 for a flight into space to enable thrill-seeking members of the 1 percent to play astronaut for a day. Jess, meanwhile, works with endangered plants while Arthur is in Manitoba, Canada, researching global warming’s effect on at-risk subarctic ecosystems. This somewhat heavy-handed mix of politics, morality and personal relationships becomes even more complicated when journalists camp out at Jess’ house and a filmmaker arrives with an offer that might save Spaceco’s finances if he’s allowed to make a documentary about the events, including a space flight with Jess on board. Jess’ emails give voice to a smart, sardonic, abrasive, not especially likable character, but it's hard to get involved in her emotional dilemmas, perhaps because of the hobbling narrative device. Even the story’s implosive conclusion has a low impact.
An intelligent new voice in fiction yet not an especially persuasive one.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-356-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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