by Chuck Palahniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2011
As the provocative novelist probably intended, reading this book is hell.
Through 11 previous novels (Tell-All, 2010, etc.), the author who first achieved notoriety through the movie adaptation of his Fight Club debut (1996) has continued to mix edgy humor with sharp social commentary while flirting with taboo. Yet his latest isn’t particularly funny, insightful or powerful. Its narrator is 13-year-old Madison—who tries her best to keep secret her full name: Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer. She has the voice of a typical teenage girl, one who is precocious and a little overweight. But she is dead. And her parents are obviously patterned on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (actually more the former than the latter), whose relentless self-promotion includes a series of high-profile adoptions, and who do their best to keep their daughter stuck in time, well short of puberty. Or did, because now that Madison is dead, she is beyond their reach—in hell. The author’s creative imagination in conjuring the realm of eternal damnation falls considerably short of Dante’s. Telemarketing comes from hell. So does porn. It has rivers and lakes of bodily secretions. It spawned TV and the Internet. It is remarkably easy to become consigned there, making the reader wonder what might possibly be required to gain entry into heaven. Madison is there because of a fatal marijuana overdose, or at least that’s what she says at the start. Almost all lawyers, journalists and celebrities are there. It is not a metaphor for life on earth: “What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is Earth. Dead is dead,” writes Madison. Each of the 38 short chapters begins, with a nod toward Judy Blume: “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison.” The novel sustains a consistency of narrative voice, but there is little plot or momentum, until it climaxes at the end with a power play, identity transformation and O. Henry–ish twist, followed by the most frightening of all possible promises: “To be continued…”
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53302-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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