An absorbing but unpolished fugitive tale.
In this debut novel, the title character turns out to be a handsome, slim, tough, good-natured, but short-tempered Italian immigrant machinist in 1930s America.
A hardworking newcomer with a love of drink and women, Felicissimo, aka “Fee,” finds himself in a terrible predicament. After a barroom fistfight with a bigger foe named Jimmy O’Toole, Fee is the prime suspect in the man’s subsequent death. Despite the fact that the real killer is Fee’s own brother Michelangelo and that the machinist would have an alibi if his so-called friend Johnny stood up for him, the protagonist understands how things will really proceed for an immigrant accused of murder in the Depression-era U.S.—so he decides to go on the run. He figures the police will “make up their mind justthatquick, then lock me up and throw the key away.” Fee hits the road and leaves Cincinnati, making his way to the frigid little town of Trump, on the border of West Virginia and Maryland (“You’re right smack next to God’s country,” a truck driver tells him). Once Fee arrives in Trump, he has too big a personality to genuinely “lie low,” and his picaresque misadventures continue until the forces of the law threaten to catch up with him. Koh’s text is ambitious: the entire story is told in short chapters by a rotating group of first-person narrators, including Fee. All the narrators have their own phonetically spelled accents and patois (but with a fair degree of similarity across characters), and old-fashioned slang and references are freely used throughout. The result is an intriguing tale that can be challenging to follow at points, both due to the language and because all of the narrators are extremely opinionated and freely express their own biases in every situation. The characters are a curious mixture of realistic traits and bold stereotypes, showing depth at some points and broad, facile strokes at others. The dialogue is musical, if idiosyncratic (“Him standin’ there wid ’em droppy ol’ lids watchin’ me like I’m some kinda pitcher show, no wonder I was high and outside that time”). The pacing is fast, but the small scale of the story makes it seem slower. A lot happens but nothing to shake the world—only to disrupt Fee’s universe.
An absorbing but unpolished fugitive tale.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5245-8011-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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