The pages turn at such a blistering pace that readers will happily overlook the improbable plot.
A Hollywood writer, not content with adequate wealth, aims for filthy lucre with disastrous results.
The golden door has finally opened for David Armitage, Hollywood scribe. After years of struggling as a unproduced playwright and low-paid bookseller (while his actress wife Lucy worked as a telemarketer to support him and their child, Caitlin), David’s sitcom pilot, Selling You (think Mad Men as half-hour comedy), has been sold to Fox by his doggedly persistent agent, Alison. All of a sudden he’s a hot commodity with a hit series. Movie deals come out of the woodwork, as does money—soon David has a potty-mouthed but shrewd broker earning him pre-crash returns (this novel was originally published in 2006), and a Fox executive, Sally, showing more than professional interest. Besotted not only with Sally but with the Hollywood clout she represents, David leaves Lucy, gladly agreeing to hefty alimony and child support payments. Out of the blue, reclusive billionaire Philip Fleck invites David to his private island near Antigua to discuss making (and paying vast sums for) one of David’s unproduced screenplays. While lolling on the island in luxury undreamt of by mere rich writers, David is distracted from wondering why his host has gone marlin-fishing by Fleck’s wife Martha, who plies him with Stalin-era Stoly and almost seduces him. Fleck, seemingly oblivious to any hank-panky, finally appears to green-light the picture. To cement David’s good fortune, the Emmy gods smile on Selling You. Then it all heads south. And that’s when the real drama begins.
The pages turn at such a blistering pace that readers will happily overlook the improbable plot.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0210-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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