Madden’s low-key approach to celebrity is one more part of this novel’s singular charm.
Family, friendship, self-knowledge, the theater—a successful playwright ruminates on all this and more in a haunting novel, finalist for the Orange Prize, from the Irish Madden (Authenticity, 2005, etc.).
The unnamed 39-year-old narrator is in Dublin, housesitting for her best female friend Molly Fox, who’s on vacation. Molly is considered the finest classical stage actor of her generation, and it is she, along with the dramatist herself and her best male friend Andrew, who form the core of her reflections on this June day. There is nothing static or inert about these reflections; on the contrary, Madden moves with ease between potent memories and the day’s events (they include four surprise encounters) to create a pulsing, throbbing story. It was the dramatist’s first play that launched Molly’s and her careers; the women have been close ever since, though their backgrounds are quite different. While the dramatist comes from a large, loving Catholic family in the North, Molly was abandoned by her mother on her seventh birthday and invests enormous energy in caring for her deeply depressed brother Fergus. Andrew, too, a friend from college days, had a hard childhood, a grim Belfast home with a brother, since murdered, who was a Protestant paramilitary; but, like the women, he has flourished, becoming an art historian famous for his TV appearances. The day is strung together with a series of small epiphanies: Molly, compassion itself, nonetheless has a predatory streak; Andrew has attained a “moral knowledge,” as has Fergus. And what of the playwright, who has twice shied away from marriage? Is she as resistant to intimacy as Molly is? This is left unresolved, and that’s a disappointment. Though two late revelations of unrequited love suggest a Chekhovian moment, it’s the erstwhile Dubliner Oscar Wilde who’s the novel’s presiding spirit, fittingly enough for a story rich in insights into acting, playwriting and the transformative power of theater.
Madden’s low-key approach to celebrity is one more part of this novel’s singular charm.Pub Date: May 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-42954-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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