For a fable, Wallace strikes a completely wrong tone, narrating his tale in short, ponderous, testimony-like recollections...
Heavy-handed fantasy set in the Deep South, from a hip young novelist (Ray in Reverse, 2000, etc.).
A young man trying to uncover the mysteries of his birth is one of the best premises in this business, and that’s what Wallace gives us. Thomas Rider knows he was born 18 years ago in the boondocks town of Ashland, Alabama (scene of Wallace’s debut, Big Fish, 1998), and he knows that his mother Lucy died bringing him into this world—but that’s about it. So, with the encouragement of his girlfriend Anna, he sets off for Ashland by himself to talk to the folks there and see what he can find out. His mother didn’t live in Ashland very long, apparently, and moved there only in order to look after a dilapidated house that her father had bought as an investment. Thomas talks to all the townsfolk who might have known Lucy (real-estate agent, innkeeper, village idiot, carpenter, etc.) and learns in short order that Ashland was (and is) a deeply strange place. Once famous as the “Watermelon Capital of the World,” it hasn’t had a watermelon crop since Lucy Rider died in childbirth. What does one have to do with the other? Apparently what assured the success of the town’s crops was an annual fertility rite in which the oldest male virgin in Ashland would be deflowered during a full moon in a watermelon patch. It seems that Lucy, when she moved to town, objected vehemently to this practice—and attempted to sabotage the rite by deflowering the chosen victim herself before the ceremony could take place. In the course of his inquiries, Thomas finds out who his father was, but that comes as something of an anticlimax, frankly, to learning the much weirder tale of his birthplace.
For a fable, Wallace strikes a completely wrong tone, narrating his tale in short, ponderous, testimony-like recollections by various townsfolk. The result: heavy, pompous, and dull.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-22138-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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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