Not as wildly lyrical or funny as A Fan's Notes, it's nevertheless a frighteningly believable portrait of a self-created...
Newsweek critic Gates debuts with the fictional memoirs of drunk in his midlife state of emergency: a sad suburban tale of failure, self-degradation, and the obliteration of consciousness, relieved only by the narrator's sardonic sense of humor.
Raised by his artist father, Peter Jernigan rejected bohemia for the promise of middle-class bliss in New Jersey. He commutes from his ``split-level shitbox'' to his Manhattan job in real estate until, a year or so before his 40th birthday, things fall apart with a vengeance. It begins when his wife dies in a drunken suicidal accident during a July 4th barbecue. Jernigan's teen-aged son, Danny, retreats farther into heavy-metal euphoria, and Jernigan's drinking increases exponentially. On the first anniversary of his wife's death, he meets the mother of Danny's girlfriend, the latter a 14-year-old recovering heroin addict who now does only pot and acid. When Jernigan is fired from his job, he and Danny move in with their women, and Jernigan spends his days getting sloshed. His endless boozing is interrupted by a series of nightmarish incidents (Danny's girlfriend has a bad trip; a friend of Danny's shoots himself to death on the living-room sofa), and, at the same time, Jernigan's uncontrollable sense of irony turns into bitter sarcasmhe's a mean drunk, forever mocking the cultural illiteracy of those around him. Just when it seems he can go no lower, he splits for a trailer in New Hampshire, seeking total retreat and oblivion, but ends up in a treatment center, writing these frank confessions. Gates adeptly captures the disparity between what Jernigan says and what he means, what he's thinking and what actually happensand none of it's pretty.
Not as wildly lyrical or funny as A Fan's Notes, it's nevertheless a frighteningly believable portrait of a self-created hell.Pub Date: June 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40237-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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