Buy tissues. Tears will flow.
Katie Quinn learns "[l]ife in the spotlight, on the pedestal, at the top of the world was a lonely, singular, desolate, soul-killing place" in Martin’s (Thunder and Rain, 2012, etc.) latest.
Katie’s an actress. Think Streep’s talent and Jolie’s beauty. Katie’s also burdened with near-unbearable pain. A performer able to subsume herself into character, Katie’s being destroyed—too much work, too many demands, too many prescription drugs, too many men too ready to use her. That means three ex-husbands and a biographer, a writer who deceives her and then publishes a lie-filled tabloid-headlining book. Katie has one true friend, Steady, an elderly Catholic priest. After suicide attempts and failed rehab, Katie has offered a troubling confession. Father Steady is apprehensive. He turns to another lost soul for help, a friend he calls Sunday, a man with his own dark secret. Setting his novel in Miami and Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, Martin sends Sunday and Steady to rescue Katie as she attempts to hang herself. They spirit her away to Sunday’s home, a refurbished fishing trawler anchored at the Everglades’ edge. Pampered and spoiled, angry and depressed, Katie’s resentful at first and then intrigued when Sunday offers an escape through the "third door"—a faked death, a path with which he’s familiar. Martin then private-jets the story to France and Château de Langeais, where chameleon Katie is living another life under another identity. There, as Katie grows slowly to trust Sunday, she opens herself emotionally but then collapses and rejects him after revealing her bleakest secret. Her repudiation is the catalyst inspiring Sunday to reveal his own troubled history with success and fame, allowing Katie and Sunday to discover "[a]ll hearts have but one request. To be known." The novel stumbles over a minor plot hole or two, but there are orphans, pilgrimages to a children’s hospital and other calamities as Martin’s story charges headlong into the sentimental territory—and best-seller terrain—of The Notebook, which doubtless will mean major studio screen treatment.
Buy tissues. Tears will flow.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-455-50395-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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