A literary lark, at times too labored, that offers an amusing gloss on the publishing industry’s recent problems with fakes.
Novelist Phillips (The Song is You, 2009, etc.) introduces a long-lost Shakespeare play, the titular Tragedy. This extraordinary find…
No, wait. Something’s wrong here. How come the introduction is more than twice as long as the play? Why are the editors, in their preface, urging us to read the play directly while bypassing the introduction? And why would Phillips say of the play, “It is bad. Don’t read it”? It’s all a game, of course. Ignore those editors. Read the convoluted introduction, and you’ll find it’s Phillips’s fifth novel, masquerading as autobiography. Young Arthur, named for his dad, grew up in 1960s Minneapolis with his twin sister Dana, his beloved soul mate. The kids were in awe of their father, the inspiration for this novel. He was a wonder worker, a maker of miracles. Too bad he was also a forger who would spend years in prison. One more thing: He was an ardent Shakespearean. Dana inherited his love of the plays; Arthur didn’t. The first, rambling half of the novel covers Arthur’s adolescence and adulthood and his years as a successful expatriate writer in Prague, married to a Czech. The plot kicks in late. Arthur, back stateside, is given an assignment by his dying dad. There’s a lost Shakespeare play in a safe-deposit box. Arthur must use his credibility as a writer to get it published. The ploy works. Scholars authenticate the work. Only Arthur, to his dismay, realizes too late that it’s a fake. There follows a fight between Arthur, trying to prevent publication but by now contractually bound, and his publisher, using all its corporate muscle. There’s also a nifty subplot involving Dana, who’s gay, her sweetheart, and dastardly behavior by Arthur, all of this linked to the play’s publication. After the hijinks, the play is an anticlimax, a decent enough pastiche about martial prowess and a less-than-martial king.
A literary lark, at times too labored, that offers an amusing gloss on the publishing industry’s recent problems with fakes.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6647-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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