by David Schmahmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2001
Tailor-made for Hollywood, and sure to jerk a few tears.
A South Africa native and practicing lawyer debuts with a light story about a privileged white family making their way through guilt and broken hearts in a post-apartheid world.
The Divin family prospered throughout apartheid, but they were good people. After father Silas killed himself over money troubles and the walls of apartheid began to totter in the late ’70s, the family exploded: son Danny ran off to America and success in finance; sister Bridget was jailed on the belief that she’d had a relationship with a black man, then followed Danny; and mother Helga, once a left-leaning political candidate, exited to London with a new husband, Arnold, a South African fat-cat. Family infighting forms the story’s tension, and Schmahmann is far better at depicting subtle family dynamics than addressing international political issues. Each character narrates his or her own chapter, Danny getting two to accommodate his thing for black women. Danny’s youthful romantic fling with a neighbor’s servant girl was true love, and he hasn’t forgotten her even after marrying an African-American woman, first for citizenship, then for something apparently deeper than friendship. Now, it’s the 20-year Divin reunion. Helga and Arnold arrive in the US to see the children and grandchildren, but of course there’s an ulterior motive: grandfather left a cool $6 million in the country, and can Danny go and get it out despite the laws? And once there, will he see his old fling? And what are the political and romantic ramifications of all this? The author’s tone of lament is easy to submit to, but the descriptions too often read like set direction, the asides like character development. It’s Gordimer territory with neither the majesty of words nor the completeness of vision. Schmahmann tries to keep us on the edge of our seats by tactically withholding critical information, but for the most part the tactic is transparent and ultimately tiresome.
Tailor-made for Hollywood, and sure to jerk a few tears.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-893996-16-6
Page Count: 327
Publisher: White Pine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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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