by Daniel Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2007
Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.
A magician conjures abject failure in Wallace’s (The Watermelon King, 2003, etc.) bleak fourth.
Glum protagonist Henry Walker is first seen as a ten year old growing up in a dismal hotel where his drunken father toils as a janitor (after losing his fortune to the Crash and his wife to TB). Henry’s sister is his dearest companion until he encounters Mr. Sebastian in Room 702. An otherworldly man with a chalk-white complexion, Sebastian trains Henry in the dark arts, then disappears, spiriting Hannah away. After a police investigation turns up no clues, Henry’s father reluctantly apprentices him to a talent agent, Tom Hailey, who, thinking Henry will be more marketable as a Negro magician, places him on a regimen of pigmentation pills. World War II intervenes and Henry (white again) garners a rep for magically deflecting bullets and bombs in France. Upon landing in New York Harbor, he’s taken up by an ambitious manager, Eddie Kastenbaum. However, when Henry raises his beloved assistant, and Hannah surrogate, Marianne, from the dead, his career tanks prematurely. In dreamlike sequences, Henry revisits Room 702, trying to parse the enigma of Hannah and Mr. Sebastian. Is Mr. Sebastian really the Devil? Did he murder Hannah? Did Henry kill Mr. Sebastian with a stunt knife? A private eye and the denizens of a traveling Southern circus where Henry has washed up—his magical powers much diminished—narrate their recollections and speculations over an 11-day period in May 1954. The voices of the individual narrators, including the circus proprietor, a strongman and a lady of stone, are as unconvincing as their motives in caring so deeply about Henry, an aloof cipher in their midst. The framing incident, which opens and closes the novel, is the abduction of Henry (now in blackface) by three racist thugs who beat him nearly to death, stopping only when someone accidentally wipes the shoe polish from his face.
Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52109-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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by Daniel Wallace ; illustrated by William Nealy
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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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