A compelling novel about queer identity and the sins that continue to haunt the American project.
A lush, provocative, and thought-provoking story of queer identity at the intersection of art, family history, capitalism, and the American racial order.
Peck (Visions and Revisions, 2015, etc.) tells the story of Judas, a scion of the fallen Stammers clan. The Stammers were once a family of Southern patricians who built a fortune on their coal empire—which means their wealth was bound up in the twin sins of slavery and environmental destruction. Like a protagonist in a Greek play, Judas pays the price for his ancestors' sins: A birth defect renders his body mangled, making him the visual representation of the Stammers' historic crimes. In an apartment near the cultish Academy that his great-grandfather Marcus founded to repent for the family's use of slave labor, Judas lives with his neglectful mother, Dixie, a talented artist whose ceramic pots are worth thousands. Consumed by the sudden eruption of his sexual appetite, Judas goes to elaborate lengths to satisfy his desire for his black classmates at the Academy. Meanwhile, in the shadow of Dixie's fame, he struggles to discover the identity of his absent father. When that missing father's books suddenly begin arriving at his and Dixie's home en masse, Judas begins to explore his family's entanglement with America's original sins. While this novel finds Peck concerned with the nation's historic debts, it is anything but serious. Judas is an irreverent, erudite, and deviously funny narrator, and the book reflects his loquacious charm with ornate prose that is downright Nabokov-ian in its exuberance, abounds in clever wordplay, malapropisms, and dense descriptive passages. Describing a creek's annual transformation from a trickle to a shallow river, Judas unleashes a torrent of florid language that reflects the creek's power: "The sheet of water lay on the land for five or six weeks, reflecting so vast a swath of sky that, staring into it from one of the third-floor windows, you could get disoriented and think you were tumbling into Heaven's opened vault." But like Judas, the book also delights in testing the reader's patience for disgustingly detailed descriptions of filth. Describing a rest stop where he seeks out anonymous sex with other men, Judas describes a repulsive scene: "[Feces] was visible everywhere, from the floaters dissolving in tea-colored water to the tread marks on the cracked tile to the smears fingerpainted on the stall by someone who found himself without toilet paper or, who knows, just didn't want to use any." In juxtaposing pristine paeans to nature with such nauseating scenes, Peck creates a sense of how thin the line between beauty and depravity is.
A compelling novel about queer identity and the sins that continue to haunt the American project.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-780-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
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
SEEN & HEARD
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