CARRYING THE BODY

Name: CARRYING THE BODY
Author: Dawn Raffel
ISBN: 0-7432-2863-4

by Dawn Raffel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002

Rambling and obscure, this ultimately incoherent story never convinces you of the pertinence (much less importance) of the...

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A virtually unreadable debut novella by O, The Oprah Magazine editor Raffel (short fiction: In the Year of Long Division, 1995).

The story is basically about an unhappy family: Elise (usually referred to as “the mother”) returns to the childhood home she had run away from years earlier with her lover (referred to as “the lover”). She returns without the lover, however, bringing instead her sickly son James (usually referred to as “the boy”), who is not in very good shape at all. Elise’s own mother (referred to as “Mother”) died some years before, and while her father (“the father”) is still alive, he doesn’t get around much anymore and the place is kind of a dump. Elise’s sister (always called “the aunt”) is still around, and she looks after the boy while Elise pokes around the house looking for something she seems to have left behind. The aunt is a drunk, and at night she settles down with her nipper of gin and tells the boy a meandering version of the “Three Little Pigs” that becomes stranger and more meandering each night. There are long descriptions of the house—a once very grand house, apparently, built by the father—that make it sound very ominous and creepy. There are also long stretches of pointless dialogue (“ ‘Please,’ said the child.” / “ ‘No,’ said the aunt.” / “ ‘Drink?’ said the child. ‘Some?’ ” / “ ‘Not for you,’ the aunt said” / “ ‘Want it,’ the child said.” / “ ‘This isn’t what you think it is.’ ” / “ ‘Juice?’ ” / “ ‘No juice,’ said the aunt. ‘This is gin’ ”) that sound like the cuttings from David Mamet’s floor, while the narration is sonorous and deliberately overwrought (“The place was not the aunt’s. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the place was the father’s”). The ending, which doesn’t really make clear what Elise was looking for or whether she makes peace with her family, doesn’t succeed in making much sense of the proceedings.

Rambling and obscure, this ultimately incoherent story never convinces you of the pertinence (much less importance) of the events it describes.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-7432-2863-4

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. COUNEY
by Dawn Raffel

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE YEAR OF LONG DIVISION
by Dawn Raffel

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.