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ACCEPTABLE LOSSES

Name: ACCEPTABLE LOSSES
Author: Edra Ziesk
ISBN: 0-87074-412-7

by Edra Ziesk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 1997

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Lyrical, sad first novel about three teenagers growing up in a New Jersey town in the 1960s, with political events such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the Vietnam War in the background. Ziesk tells her story in the present tense, from the point of view of Joellen Stein, a sensitive girl who has recently lost her mother, feels estranged from her father, and whose entire outlook is colored by sorrow. Ida, a black woman who comes to cook for the family, becomes a kind of surrogate mother to her, but Joellen does not really escape the blues until she falls in love with young Joe Handy. Joellen is an introverted, self-indulgent character, and the reader may tire of her introspective musings, which are often banal. But Joe, a troubled young man with an absent father and a pitiful, alcoholic mother, is as richly imagined as a Dickens character. He learns to steal, to work, and to make love in the process of inventing himself, and Ziesk's scenes with Joe and Joellen sparkle. Too soon, though, Ziesk packs Joe off to Vietnam, where he's killed, and the reader is once again trapped in Joellen's consciousness. An innocent childhood friend of Joellen's, Charlieo, drifts into view, but Ziesk sends him to Vietnam as well, and brings him back coarsened and mutilated. He attempts to rape Joellen and then, oddly, just disappears. Meanwhile, Joellen graduates from high school and becomes a real estate agent, and a third man, a young police officer, enters her life, determinedly pursuing this grim young woman. In another hopeful development, Ida is pregnant. Ziesk invokes pathos beyond the point of believability: Her novel is so sad that it borders on the sentimental. An intense, clearly talented, but rather confused debut, flawed by an exasperating protagonist.

Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1997

ISBN: 0-87074-412-7

Page Count: 316

Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.