Horrocks follows up her well-regarded story collection, This Is Not Your City (2011), with a rueful novel about composer Erik Satie, his family, and friends.
The parameters of the Satie siblings’ lives are set shortly after their mother dies in 1872. Their overwhelmed father leaves them with relatives and vanishes; when he returns with a new wife, only Erik and younger brother Conrad are reclaimed, while Louise is left with their great-uncle. Her rage and bitterness are mostly justified by subsequent events in her life, chronicled in a first-person narration so vivid it frequently steals focus from the chapters narrated by Erik, Conrad, Erik’s friend Philippe, and Suzanne, the only woman emotionally cut-off Erik comes close to loving. The twin traumas of his mother’s death and the involuntary separation from Louise have made him pathologically wary of any kind of connection, including those that might smooth the way for his deliberately provocative music. Aspiring poet Philippe collaborates with Erik for a while and admires his friend’s disdain for compromise but ultimately opts for a more stable existence. Horrocks paints an atmospheric portrait of bohemian Paris and a poignant one of Satie and his avant-garde circle, who “lived in the yet: not now, but soon” when their art would be recognized. Meanwhile, they drink and scandalize the bourgeoisie with their bad behavior. An episode of unintentional cruelty cements Erik’s estrangement from Louise, whose losses mount in a wrenching account made bearable only by the fact that she narrates it as an elderly survivor in 1944. Erik’s story takes longer to engage readers, but gradually his austere passion and fierce dedication to his music become as affecting as Louise’s catalog of pain and deprivation. A keening finale revisits him at 21, with “the most popular seven minutes he will ever write…fading away in the sweaty, soot-dark room.”
Finely written and deeply empathetic, a powerful portrait of artistic commitment and emotional frustration.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31691-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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