bookshelf

HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE

Name: HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE
Author: Emma Chapman
ISBN: 978-1-250-01819-9

by Emma Chapman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2013

Gripping but rather implausible.

bookshelf

A mad housewife learns that her problems may not all be imaginary in Chapman’s disquieting debut.

Somewhere in an unnamed Scandinavian country, in an isolated village, a middle-aged woman named Marta Bjornstad has gone off her medication, unbeknownst to her doting husband, Hector. The time is apparently the present, although there is not a smartphone in sight, and the Internet is only referred to once. Hector, a schoolteacher 20 years her senior, has always been an avuncular figure in Marta’s life, ever since he rescued her, as a recently orphaned young woman, from a desperate situation whose particulars are shrouded in a haze of amnesia. Marriage to Hector has, for the last two decades or so, been pleasant but always overshadowed by hypercritical mother-in-law Matilda, who, despite her relief at Hector’s belated marriage, has always made Marta feel inadequate, however strictly she follows the precepts outlined in Matilda’s wedding gift, a retro guidebook entitled How to be a Good Wife. Now, however, Marta’s delicate equilibrium has been upset by empty-nest syndrome: Her only child, Kylan, has left home for a job in the city and is engaged to Katya, who, disturbingly, reminds Marta of her younger, dimly recalled self. As the medication wears off, Marta begins to experience some startling visions. She sees a thin girl, apparently a ballet dancer, in dreams and in real time. Like a specter out of Sixth Sense, the girl beckons, seemingly desperate to tell Marta something. Gradually, it dawns on Marta and the reader that her hallucinations may actually be emerging suppressed memories. Without spoilers it’s impossible to specify further exactly how these snippets of recalled trauma reach critical mass. Suffice to say that the twist that propels expectations in a whole new direction is masterfully wrought. However, the outcome, driven by some highly improbable circumstances and a demonstrable lack of ingenuity on the part of the protagonist, will leave readers, particularly feminists and/or victims’ advocates, very dissatisfied indeed.

Gripping but rather implausible.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-01819-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

bookshelf

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.