In her first signed novel since the mythical Canopus in Argos series, Lessing returns to reality—and to her considerable gifts for social observation and vivid characterization. Using a spectrum of left-wing characters, she focuses on the kinds of personal instability that would be drawn to—and solaced by—a terrorist stance. Lewis Carroll's Alice began by falling down a rabbit hole; Lessing's contemporary Alice—36, overweight, mixed-up, terrified of sex—began by being involved (since the 1960's) in squatter's rights and increasingly radical politics. Though celibrate, Alice lives with and for gay Jasper, a self-centered, politically pure neurotic (psychotic?) who has decided, as the novel opens, to make contact with the provisional IRA. Though early chapters show Alice's curious mixture of calm competence (she manipulates bureaucrats at the gas and water boards into supplying service to their new "squat") and infantile rage (she travels to her father's house one night expressly to throw a rock through the window, striking one of the young children of his second marriage), Alice is a mother-figure, not only to Jasper but to every waif that drifts into her new squat. Yet from the beginning there are frissons of instability: in Alice herself and in the web of relationships that quickly form in the household which Alice, quite unconsciously, dominates. These tensions increase as Jasper and Bert, titular heads of the group, become absorbed in plans for a car-bombing. Lessing offers a penetrating analysis of a sub-group (middle- and working-class political extremists) more often caricatured than characterized. The main focus is on the pathology of ideological "purity"—on how a "good" person like Alice, who is instinctively kind whenever one of her blind spots is not in operation, can arrive at an almost bland acceptance of random violence. The implied political message—as idiosyncratic as the quirky feminism of the Canopus series—seems to be that we don't really choose our political preferences; rather, they choose—and then control—us. The self-deluding Alice is not an easy character to spend time with, but her story is an extraordinary tour de force—a psychological portrait that's realistic with a vengeance. Altogether, this is a book which is strong as a diagnostic study of political motivation—and stronger still as an uncannily authentic character-study.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1985
ISBN: 0307389960
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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