Gently comic depiction of love’s power to heal internal and external wounds.
In the Georgia-based author’s debut, a sweet-natured misfit with a debilitating acne problem takes heroic steps to gain control of his life after his live-in girlfriend takes residence at a fancy fat-farm.
Hiding out from the judging eyes of a harsh and beauty-fixated world may have become a way of life for 37-year-old Hobbie, but since high school he at least had a partner with whom to share his exile, his long-time love Kari. With his cystic acne and her obesity, the couple traveled from suburb to suburb, never staying anywhere long enough to make friends or live up to their potential. Tellingly, both were molested by the same church deacon as young teens, shattering their self-images. So when Kari finally decides to make a change in her life and enrolls in a strict in-patient weight-loss program in North Carolina, Hobbie is understandably bereft. Left with their small dog Terry in rural Georgia, and forbidden to contact Kari, he subsists on regular missives that document her rapidly diminishing weight. Wondering when, or if, he will ever see her again, he is shaken out of his stupor when Terry is attacked by a bear. Hobbie fights off the hungry animal with an umbrella and wakes up with an impressive gash on his already ravaged face. Taken in by his de-facto father-in-law Roth—a church bookkeeper guilt-ridden over what happened to his daughter and Hobbie—he discovers a family secret that Kari and her father had been keeping from him. But it is when Roth is suddenly felled by a stroke that Hobbie decides to stop waiting and go after Kari. He hits the road with Roth, Terry and Kari’s estranged mom Sally, in a tragicomic quest to save her from herself. Along the way, Hobbie comes to terms with his past and starts to actually see a future. Full of insight and wonderfully complex characters, this deceptively slim work is emotionally satisfying—assuming readers can get past the frequent gross descriptions of Hobbie’s skin condition.
Gently comic depiction of love’s power to heal internal and external wounds.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7535-1299-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Virgin Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
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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