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THE RULES OF ATTRACTION

Having yawned at hyper-decadent L.A. in Less Than Zero (1985), Ellis here seems just as bored with the ultra-hip rich kids wasting time by getting wasted at super-chic Camden College (read: Bennington) in chilled-out New England. For lack of an apparent plot or point, Ellis strings together a series of deliberately listless vignettes, each narrated by one of the many terminally numb characters who sleep walk through this nightmare. At the center of the various competing narratives is the "so good-looking" Sean Bateman, who describes his college pursuits thusly: "Get drunk, screw constantly." And he does both with little concern for anyone else. He lies, cheats, and shoplifts mainly in an effort to cover up the fact that he's mega-rich, but also because he's just plain nasty—to his dying father, his yuppie brother, and to all his lovers at school, especially Paul, an unabashedly gay drama major who's self-deluded enough to misread Sean's cryptic remarks as true love. Sean's all-purpose comments ("Rock 'n' roll" and "Deal with it") eventually infuriate his other main squeeze, Lauren, who took up with Sean only because her lover, Victor, is in Europe. The other indistinct voices heard here belong to Stuart, who lusts for Paul at a distance; Mary, who leaves anonymous mash-notes for Sean, then slashes her wrists when he ignores her at a "Dressed to Get Screwed Party"; Victor, who doesn't even remember Lauren; Mitchell, who's trying to forget his homosexual past with Paul; and so on in this bisexual daisy-chain of a novel. Only Bertrand, a French student who writes articles for the school paper on herpes and Ecstasy (the drug), sounds distinct—his brief bit is transcribed in Ellis' Intermediate French. A few Camden characters from Jill Eisenstadt's new novel (see above) have cameos here—a much-publicized in-joke between these fellow Benningtonites. Without an authorial voice of any kind, it's difficult to blame Ellis himself for the shaky grammar and inept prose, but it does make you wonder.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1987

ISBN: 067978148X

Page Count: 290

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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