UNSPENT MOTION

Name: UNSPENT MOTION
Author: Celeste Newbrough
ISBN: 978-1493753345

by Celeste Newbrough ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2013

An intimate portrayal of lives whose final chapters often go largely unobserved; best appreciated by those interested in...

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A collection of short stories and a novella that explore love, aging, loss and solitude from a feminist perspective.

Nearly all of Newbrough’s (The Archetype Strikes Back, 2012) protagonists are older women, isolated in some way through circumstances or quirks of their personalities. There’s the widow suffering from dementia, the prim cat lady, the graveyard-shift janitor obsessed with reality television, and others. Many of the stories end with a death; taken together, the collection feels like a series of final chapters carved from larger, more compelling narratives. In her acknowledgments, Newbrough explains that her intent is to explore how “despite a person’s isolation or withdrawal the world persists within the self and transformation occurs as long as life endures.” Overall, however, the sensation is one of denouement rather than transformative change. The exception is the novella, Child with Mannequin, the fourth story in this volume, in which the main character is an oil painting created as a gesture of maternal love but then ultimately stolen from the beloved daughter it depicts. The ambitious story envisions the painting as a mute yet intelligent observer of lives representing a broad cross section of New Orleans society from the early 20th century to the floods that accompanied Hurricane Katrina in 2004. Here, where life and death are both metaphor and fact, Newbrough’s thematic concept carries more weight: She makes clear how intellectual and emotional lives can transcend generations and how losses can be both permanent and permeable. The prose is intelligent and sometimes-evocative but often sloppy: “Why Martha married Jason in the first place was a mystery of her own heart.” A firmer editorial eye—both to eliminate errors and streamline some of the more overblown language (e.g., “chthonic depths”)—would have made this gathering of stories even more quietly compelling.

An intimate portrayal of lives whose final chapters often go largely unobserved; best appreciated by those interested in feminist literature and issues of aging.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013

ISBN: 978-1493753345

Page Count: 272

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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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.