Considerably more mature than its predecessors, and just as scathingly brilliant with words, but this author is definitely...
Man Booker winner Pierre (Ludmila’s Broken English, 2006, etc.) continues on his polarizing way with another extreme adventure, this one undertaken by a narrator who plans to kill himself.
Readers may not feel too terrible about that, since Gabriel, like Pierre’s protagonist in Vernon God Little (2002), is initially as obnoxious as he is motor-mouthed. Just checked into rehab by his father, Gabriel puffs defiantly on cigarettes while ranting about capitalism and messing with the staff. Soon he slips away for a final pre-suicide bacchanal with his best friend Smuts, who’s working at an ultra-exclusive Tokyo restaurant that serves poisonous (and illegal) fugu to those who can afford it. Unfortunately, once Gabriel gets done loading him up with coke and booze, Smuts recklessly takes the challenge of a customer who wants the fish’s extra-toxic liver. The customer winds up in the hospital, and Smuts in jail. The only way Gabriel can spring him is by getting Smuts’ shadowy “sponsor,” Didier Le Basque, to pull strings. And the only way to do that is to convince Didier, who makes a fortune creating one-of-a-kind banquets for rich thrill-seekers, that Gabriel can connect him to a unique venue. So off Gabriel goes to Berlin, where his detested father had a club in the 1990s. Things get even crazier when Gabriel actually does discover the perfect spot for a decadent feast: miles of tunnels and bunkers built for the Third Reich underneath Tempelhof Airport. Even as he enthusiastically participates in the excesses of Didier’s right-hand man Thomas, who’s arranging the bash in the bunkers, Gabriel is developing a guilty conscience about the whole affair. Can it be that our hero is growing up? Well, yes: Gabriel eventually drops his intended suicide, along with several other affectations of youth, though Pierre does feel obliged to provide an over-the-top finale involving fireworks both gastronomic and incendiary.
Considerably more mature than its predecessors, and just as scathingly brilliant with words, but this author is definitely an acquired taste.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08123-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
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.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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