THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF A PASTOR’S DISAPPEARANCE

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THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF A PASTOR’S DISAPPEARANCE

Name: THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF A PASTOR’S DISAPPEARANCE
Author: Benjamin Anastas
ISBN: 0-374-15214-4

by Benjamin Anastas ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

An ambitious book, undone by its surfeit of symbolic meanings, leading—well, God knows where.

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A satire on the state of the American soul comes partially dressed in the bygone literary conventions of such learned colonists as Jonathan Edwards.

Thomas Mosher is the young, black pastor of the Pilgrim's Congregational Church ("An Historic Church with a Modern Message") in W_________, Massachusetts, serving a white, upper-middle-class congregation, until one day, after a particularly esoteric sermon, "The Shapes of Love," Mosher disappears, vanishing without a trace. With this potent conceit in place, Anastas (An Underachiever’s Diary, 1998) embarks on his treatise against rampant US materialism by wading into the lives of the congregants, who most definitely fit the sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God bill. His major doer of wrong is Bethany Caruso, mother of two difficult children and wife of a sex-starved husband, who is carrying on an affair with the "well-liked" pastor. She's followed closely by Margaret Howard, the high-powered real-estate broker and racist who motivates her staff by insisting that a property represents "Love and Happiness!" Anastas tempers his condemnation with portraits of other, good, congregants, who are not only devout but as lonely, flawed, and wounded by the world as Thomas. His devoted assistant minister, the Reverend Jane Groom, finds intimacy so challenging that she lives with a dog named Molly Bloom, and a fair share of the narrative is devoted to Molly in estrus and Jane's efforts to fend off suitors. Indeed, the lives of these and other characters command the narrative, while Thomas, a black man of mixed parentage, too awkward to have excelled in sports, and, for the most part, a mediocre lover, remains an enigma, his melancholy shadow hinted at through the lives of his flock. That's not enough. His reasons for adultery with Bethany, who "replaced his religion and silenced God," may leave the reader fidgeting and slightly dazed, like his congregants as they listened to that last sermon.

An ambitious book, undone by its surfeit of symbolic meanings, leading—well, God knows where.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-374-15214-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
by Benjamin Anastas

- BOOK REVIEW
AN UNDERACHIEVER'S DIARY
by Benjamin Anastas

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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.

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.