Easy, accessible prose tinged with nostalgia; characters both well developed and sympathetic in spite of their bad behavior:...
Rueful and wildly comic, this boisterous, boozy novel by the author of Snakehunter (1973) offers a carnal salute to that disappearing literary species, the unrepentant American bad boy writer.
Imagine The Ginger Man set in San Francisco during the 1970s. Kinder sets loose two talented writers, Ralph and Jim, on the West Coast literary world of Ken Kesey and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, and in the process provides enough sex, booze, pot, friendship, perfidy, betrayal, bad checks, black humor, and politically incorrect insouciance to satisfy almost anyone. Drunk, loquacious, and broke, Ralph Crawford (based loosely on Raymond Carver) is snared in an ongoing love/hate relationship with his wife, the volatile, spirited, foul-mouthed Alice Ann, and with his two thieving teenaged children, who are lost to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. He’s also in love with a woman in Montana, a flower-child goddess named Lindsay with a penchant for budding writers. Ralph enlists his best friend Jim, a tough, laconic writer/occasional drug -dealer, to deliver a packet of letters to Lindsay, and Jim promptly falls in love with her too. He and Lindsay subsequently marry, and Ralph seems to accept this situation, but does he still love his friend’s wife? Does she still love him? And will Alice Ann succeed in her latest attempt to rejuvenate her sagging, vindictive marriage to Ralph? Complications ensue, both hilarious and sad, as this foursome and various lowlife literary friends careen around the Bay Area, drinking, partying, fighting, walking out on checks, placating the police, and trying to resolve their romantic entanglements. As the story progresses, Ralph publishes a short story collection, and Jim a novel, both to critical acclaim, but neither event has much immediate impact on the messy particulars of their lives.
Easy, accessible prose tinged with nostalgia; characters both well developed and sympathetic in spite of their bad behavior: a fine, funny slice of literary life.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-17258-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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