One of the best novelists at work today, White spins an entangling—and thoroughly entertaining—yarn.
Top-flight novelist White (City Boy, 2009, etc.) returns with a bittersweet story of the love that dared not speak its name until about the winter of 1963.
The chronology is a little fuzzy, but the author situates the opening of his latest novel safely in the cozy prep-school world of the late 1950s. Jack Holmes is a glorious son of a Rust Belt then brilliantly agleam, tall and blonde and “with stomach muscles as hard as a turtle’s shell,” popular with everyone. It would be easy for him to coast, to live a superficial life, but Jack is a person of depth and complexity. So we learn when, after college, our Gatsby makes his way east and pitches his tent among the bohemians of Greenwich Village. His intelligence soon land him on the staff of a high-culture magazine where, “over-caffeinated, overdressed, and under-instructed,” he wrangles with an editor who’s smarter than Susan Sontag and more frustrated than Portnoy. At the same time, he enjoys an increasingly catholic diet of friends and bedmates, including, eventually, a promising young novelist named Will Wright—the name is suggestive—who emerges, over the chapters and decades, as Jack’s soul mate. This is not all to the good, for White’s story takes in not just the time of innocence and Camelot, but also the very first inklings of the “gay plague” that was first known as GRID, later as AIDS; Will’s final dedication to Jack reads, “Our libertine days are over.” So they are. White’s book embraces a classic love story, but it is much more: It offers something of a cultural history of gay life in New York in the closeted era before Stonewall. In the sometimes facetious, sometimes mutually uncomprehending, sometimes blazingly intelligent interplay of people of all sorts of orientations, gay and straight and in between, and all sorts of backgrounds and nationalities, White’s narrative is sometimes reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories—which is no small praise. But White’s chief characters are all-American types, which one supposes is the point: Though Jack’s psychiatrist may scold him for “acting out,” and though they were subject to criminal prosecution in their day, his desires and passions are utterly normal. White’s writing, of course, is not.
One of the best novelists at work today, White spins an entangling—and thoroughly entertaining—yarn.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-703-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
IN THE NEWS
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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