A worthy exploration of a subject that remains underrepresented in fiction.
A New York pawnbroker reckons with the loss of his family in the Holocaust in one of the first American novels to confront the atrocity.
First published in 1961 and a finalist for the National Book Award, the second novel by Wallant (1926-1962) is a close cousin to Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, another book in which a small shop becomes a flashpoint for violence and a window into Jewish suffering. Sol Nazerman runs his Harlem store with dour aloofness—contempt for negotiation, distrust toward his sole employee, and exasperation with the youth-center fundraiser trying to crack his defenses. “Friendliness rolled off that man like water off porcelain,” as Wallant elegantly puts it. But though Sol is somewhat one-note and doesn't match the creations of Malamud, Bellow, Henry Roth, and other Jewish-American writers Wallant was associated with during his brief career, Sol's still waters do run deep. He’s most prominently affected by the Holocaust: Sol is plagued with harrowing memories of the cattle car that took him to the camps, of murdered fellow detainees, and of his wife’s forced prostitution. His fragile sources of stability are the shop, the family he lives with and whose financial crises he manages, and the woman with whom he has a sexual relationship that’s shot through with “desperation and mutual anguish.” For all that gloom, though, Wallant’s goal isn’t to explore Sol’s inner despair so much as to reveal the complexities of the larger world by having Sol abrade against it. Much of the book’s force and flashes of humor derive from Sol’s interactions with the motley souls entering the shop; despite some awkward ethnic slang, there’s a sharp, photorealistic quality to those minor characters. And the book gains energy from its plot, which involves a mobster and a planned robbery that puts Sol in an awful position that Wallant thoughtfully interrogates throughout: how do you trustfully navigate the world when you’ve experienced the worst that people are capable of?
A worthy exploration of a subject that remains underrepresented in fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941493-14-4
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Fig Tree Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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
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