by Ed McClanahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
How much is fiction? How much is memoir? Who cares: It’s joyous.
Autofictional tales about the author’s Kentucky childhood, friendship with Ken Kesey, and relationship with his memories.
In “A Work of Genius,” the opening piece in this shaggy but moving collection, McClanahan (I Just Hitched in From the Coast, 2011, etc.) tells the story of the day, in 1947, when an aging bicycle performer named Kramer visited Brooksville, Kentucky, and more or less wowed the pants off young McClanahan (then age 14) with his “uncanny kinetic miracles of equilibrium and grace and strength.” In the seven intervening decades, McClanahan then says, he “recounted Kramer’s wondrous exploits times beyond number, to family, friends, and all manner of other captive audiences,” and, “over the course of all those tellings and re-tellings, the story took on something of a life of its own…and gathered unto itself certain adjustments, embellishments, flourishes, and adornments, to the point that eventually I wasn’t quite sure I still recognized it myself.” McClanahan’s project here, though—in both “A Work of Genius” and, the reader must assume, the tales that follow—is to shed these “fanciful trappings” and, using a mixture of “quasi-reliable details” and limited creative license, fix some core version of his story “permanently…in writing.” Disclaimer aside, McClanahan then lures the reader—with his trademark jocularity and bountiful prose—through the wistful banalities of a midcentury, middle-American boyhood. His anecdotes wind together, flowing almost associatively, and cover topics such as his infatuation with cigarettes; his fraught relationship with his entrepreneur father (“we were a well-oiled perpetual animosity machine"); a mismatched freshman year at a “Southern Gentleman’s college,” here called “Eustace J. Spoonbred University”; his friendship with Ken Kesey; and his lifelong appreciation for the Cincinnati Reds. If a couple of McClanahan’s stories seem fundamentally inessential—case in point: “Me and Gurney Goes Out on the Town,” in which the author recalls seeing (or says he does) a go-go dancer violently eject a verbally abusive patron from a seedy bar—the book, taken as a whole, performs a genuinely beautiful act of post hoc portraiture, eventually building into a protracted study of McClanahan's relationship with the erosive nature of time and the happy-sad miracles of memory.<
How much is fiction? How much is memoir? Who cares: It’s joyous.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-260-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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