A melancholy, elliptical tale of friendship and alienation in the South.
Three college friends experiment with an off-the-grid commune in rural Arkansas but struggle to find stability in the Project—or in one another.
Carter’s debut novel explores the crushing blow of the financial crisis on floundering 20-somethings in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job or a happy future. Ellie is a struggling alcoholic having an affair with her married, older boss, while Chloe falls head over heels for a fair-weather lover. Both women spend their nights slinging drinks atViceroy and wondering if there’s more. When their mutual friend Rachel invites them to move into a dilapidated country house she shares with her gurulike boyfriend, Autry, Chloe and Ellie try to find “peace and health in the chaos of a cruel, disconnected world.” Over the course of a disastrous, slow-motion year, the young women attempt to trade alcohol and dead-end relationships for trance meditation and survivalist philosophy. Like most would-be revolutionaries, Autry winds up to be all talk and no action, and all three women worsen. Ellie retreats further into her destructive behavior; Chloe’s mental health demons put her in danger; and Rachel grows more and more restless. Throughout the novel, Carter’s language is surprising, even tactile. A cold-weather embrace feels like “the beginning of winter in his coat,” while going through the motions of a bad relationship feels like being turned into “a stuffed animal.” But the plot, which alternates among points of view, loses both the thread of Chloe’s voice and the urgency of her breakdown. After a year at the Project, Rachel and Ellie struggle with the idea of normal lives, and Carter seems to suggest this is a symptom, rather than an effect, of the failed Project.
A melancholy, elliptical tale of friendship and alienation in the South.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-899-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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