A portrait of university life that’s contemplative and nostalgic.
Finch (An Old Betrayal, 2013, etc.) creates a lyrical ode to youth, idealism and love in a contemporary novel about a young man’s year of graduate studies at Oxford University.
There are moments and people that significantly impact a person’s life and spur major transitions, and Yale graduate William Baker experiences both when he arrives on the Fleet campus of Oxford. As he describes his year, he reflects upon the emotional, physical and intellectual journey that ushers him into the world of adulthood. While countless college students around the world routinely engage in activities similar to Will’s, what makes this fairly routine coming-of-age story so appealing is twofold: Finch’s accomplished narrative skills and his ability to connect each character with the reader. Will, a former campaign worker for John Kerry’s unsuccessful 2004 presidential bid, leaves his girlfriend, Alison, stateside and settles into student life in England, which he and Alison remind themselves is only for a year. But it’s a year that challenges their relationship, as Will contemplates social barriers, financial comfort and his feelings for Sophie, a fellow Oxford student who’s involved with another man. Will also develops friendships with a diverse group: snobbish Tom, who looks down on Will for being American but becomes his closest friend; Anil, a student from Mumbai who comically embraces hip-hop but can’t mask his concise BBC accent; Timmo, whose one aspiration is to be a participant in a television reality series; chronically broke, good friend Ella, who falls for Tom; and Anneliese, a German student and talented photographer. Will’s experiences aren’t all that unique: The friends drink and party together, fall in and out of love, and support each other during difficult times and devastating losses. But Finch brings each character to life with striking effectiveness as they struggle with issues of class, the political climate, academics and their futures.
A portrait of university life that’s contemplative and nostalgic.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01871-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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