Slow-movement storytelling: fully-fleshed, compassionate, and satisfying.
The abandonment of a newborn child in a pear orchard opens an intense tale of choices and consequences which, despite its early-20th-century setting, has the capacious feel of a Victorian novel.
Set on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in the 1910s and '20s, Solomon's (The Little Bride, 2011) penetrating second work of fiction connects Irish and Jewish, workers and bluebloods, the fertile and the barren. Events spring from an abrupt sexual act that leaves wealthy, musical, Jewish Bea Haven pregnant. Sent to live with relatives in the country until the baby is born and she can take up her place at Radcliffe, 18-year-old Bea is repelled at the chilly prospect of placing her child in an orphanage and instead leaves the girl in the path of Irish trespassers who annually strip her uncle’s fruit trees. So the baby—in future known as Lucy Pear—is spirited away by Emma Murphy to join her brood of nine children. Solomon returns repeatedly to Bea’s fragile psychology in the ensuing decade: her breakdown, her withdrawal, her failing marriage to handsome, gay Albert Cohn, her sadness for “all the lives that might have been hers.” Meanwhile, Lucy grows up visibly different from her adoptive family, while Emma begins an affair with a local businessman and finds herself working, briefly, for Bea, whom she recognizes as Lucy’s mother. As background, Solomon introduces Prohibition and the Sacco and Vanzetti case, yet the novel seems to belong to an earlier era of storytelling, focused on the inner lives and challenges of a community, especially the womenfolk. Repeatedly opting for the less predictable outcome, Solomon reaches resolutions marked with the same reflective maturity as the rest of this solidly absorbing novel.
Slow-movement storytelling: fully-fleshed, compassionate, and satisfying.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-594-63265-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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