Difficult, then, for those who are in search of plot, but an engaging riddle for those who aren’t.
With more than a dozen novels and a good many volumes of poetry to his credit, Sorrentino (Pack of Lies, 1997, etc.) shows no lack of energy or invention in his latest as he brings his linguistic wizardry to bear on a trio of obsessions: lust, lost loves, and lingerie.
A new kind of content emerges from the author’s use of an intensely nonnarrative approach: names and bodies parade past or loop through view with little development; short scenes receive multiple takes, each with most of the details rearranged; and a schizophrenic commentary—part acerbic critique, part poetic utterance—follows each slab of story. The plot’s rough trajectory of boy-into-man, with its full complement of initial sexual fumblings and middle-aged romantic what-ifs, is grounded in images of Brooklyn and New York half a century ago, but the story has more to do with a time of life than with any individual. Seductive poses and crude couplings abound, largely fueled by a male desire, and the slither of slips and the whiteness of cotton bras and panties, when revealed, provide readily fetishized sense-impressions to render the fantasy whole. The multivoiced response, meanwhile, like a tireless superego or an anally hostile editor, highlights factual discrepancies, moral deficiencies, and the generally limited nature of the action—with no apparent effect toward resultant changes of any kind. As the wit and wordplay in these two self-contained yet codependent spheres continues, however, the effect on the reader is almost hypnotic. As an epigraph by Joseph Cornell goes: “Although we may catalogue a kind of chain mysterious is the force that holds the chain together.”
Difficult, then, for those who are in search of plot, but an engaging riddle for those who aren’t.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56689-126-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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