The stakes are low here, and the hero’s obsessions eventually become tiresome.
Debut novel rife with arrogant directors, pompous directors of photography, pretentious assistant directors, puffed-up producers…and one victimized dolly grip.
Like almost everyone on the set of Aquarena Springs, narrator Bobby Conlon wants desperately to direct. All he sees about him are the unfit, the unqualified and the incompetent—especially the series of laughably bumbling directors who act like prima donnas to cover their ineptitude. Conlon’s personal life is also in disarray. His wife, film producer Natalie Miguel, has recently begun an affair with Harvard-educated Elias Simm, a director manqué who finally gets his chance, with risible and ultimately disastrous results. The dynamic of the soundstage changes when lead actor Ryan Donahue’s previous film opens to boffo business at the box office. Donahue is now a hot property who can call the shots—literally. Meanwhile, Conlon tries to remain faithful to his wife, at least until his divorce comes through. But his fidelity is tested by Carni, a producer “who had broken into the business working for independent filmmaker John Sayles and whose cult-like devotion to him approached the perverse.” Himself a former dolly grip, Taylor pokes fun at the various types who inhabit this collective cinematic zoo. “Q: How can you tell when a producer’s lying to you? A: His lips are moving.” The novel moves predictably through this not-terribly-adaptive subculture of the film-obsessed, while Conlon tries to overcome his addiction to “Zanax, Vicodin Anexsia, Lorcet, and every other Vicoprofen I could get a doctor to write me a prescription for.”
The stakes are low here, and the hero’s obsessions eventually become tiresome.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4877-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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