A memorable portrait of a woman of character who charms, baffles, and infuriates four generations.
Refreshingly unconventional saga of an African-American family and its brightest ornament.
That would be Matilda Housewright, light-skinned daughter of Jacob. Matilda spends her formative years in Washington, DC, where her daddy is the major-domo in the home of Senator Hunnicutt, a mover and shaker in the 1920s and ’30s. The Housewrights, declares Matilda, “aren’t alley cats.” Quite the contrary: They’re model servants and diplomats, with an intuitive understanding of the powerful and prejudiced. Matilda is smart and outspoken. Too plain to attract suitors, she won’t make the compromises required of women of color in the few professions open to them. After the Senator retires and the family moves to the Midwest (Chicago, evidently), Matilda’s older brother Martin starts a successful catering business, but her participation in his first event is a disaster. She’s a perfectionist who, maddeningly, is always right. Martin fires her and moves out of the family home, where Matilda will reign undisturbed for the rest of her long life. Haynes (All American Dream Dolls, 1997, etc.) has fashioned a clutter-free saga that skims over an entire century. It begins with Jacob’s three siblings refusing to follow their father into domestic service and ends, most movingly, with Matilda offering safe harbor to her great-nephew, a sweet-natured, desperately unhappy youngster undone by drugs. In between, Haynes, always subtly and always delicately, makes it clear that for the black employee of a white master, there is no margin for error. Even proud Matilda has to make a shocking deal to secure the family future. The stakes are higher if you’re black, as Martin’s son David, an idealistic Panther, will find out in another shock. Haynes has a masterly way of not letting the reader become too comfortable with the serene surface of domestic life, where everything comes at a cost.
A memorable portrait of a woman of character who charms, baffles, and infuriates four generations.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1569-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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