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ISOBEL ON THE WAY TO THE CORNER SHOP

Name: ISOBEL ON THE WAY TO THE CORNER SHOP
Author: Amy Witting
ISBN: 978-1-922182-71-5

by Amy Witting ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015

A compassionate masterpiece.

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Isobel Callaghan, a struggling young writer with a difficult past, collapses on the way to buy provisions at the corner store and soon finds herself—much to her surprise—recovering from tuberculosis in the self-contained society of Mornington Sanatorium.

Australian writer Witting's (I is for Isobel, 1989, etc.) quietly brilliant novel was published in her own country in 1999 and is appearing in the U.S. for the first time; it's set in the middle of the 20th century. Anxious, poor, and isolated, Isobel is worried she’s losing her mind. She’s quit her job (translating German mail at an importers) in a rage and, buoyed by the encouragement of a highbrow editor, has taken an attic room in a Sydney boardinghouse to write fiction. Now, overridden by social anxiety and rapidly running out of money, Isobel has begun to deteriorate in a way she doesn’t understand. Upon collapsing in the street, she’s taken to a local hospital; her madness, it seems, is better known as tuberculosis. “How could she explain the relief she felt at learning that this thing had a name and a location, that there were people whose business it was to deal with it?” she wonders. Surrendered to her new circumstances—a material improvement, all things considered—Isobel finds herself falling into the sanatorium’s rhythms. Though the patients are all bedridden, to varying degrees, the place has a social scene of its own, with the doctors, nurses, and patients forming a parallel universe outside of space and time. Witting’s characterizations are staggeringly sharp—it is hard to imagine a novel more keenly observed—simultaneously heartbreaking and (subtly) hilarious, not because they're exaggerated, but because they are so unsettlingly, overwhelmingly true: Isobel's pathologically self-centered roommate (“You’re not one of those people who read all the time, are you?”); her beloved Dr. Wang; the birdlike Miss Landers, who runs the sanatorium’s knitting-based occupational therapy program. But as Isobel recovers, she must come to terms with her life outside the confines of this miniature world—and here, too, Witting is as astute and unsentimental as ever.

A compassionate masterpiece.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-922182-71-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Text

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

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.