A haunting portrait of an era that only gets better as it goes along.
Set amid the social upheaval of the 1960s, Kohler’s sensitive debut follows a pair of San Francisco siblings struggling to make sense of the roles that have been set out for them.
After their mother’s sudden death, 20-year-old Jeannie and 14-year-old Kip find themselves existentially and practically adrift. Over the course of the next few years, Jeannie trades secretarial school for a waitressing job, meets a nice doctor (a Goldwater supporter), gets pregnant, and marries him, becoming—on paper, at least—the epitome of 1960s domestic success. Meanwhile, Kip, restless and brooding, gets caught trying to rob a supposedly abandoned liquor store. In court, the judge presents him with two options: finish high school or join the military, and in spite of Jeannie and their World War II–veteran father, Kip decides to enlist in the Marine Corps. Kip and Jeannie have at least one thing in common, though: they’re both trapped in lives that don’t quite fit. In San Francisco, Jeannie—always conventional, even prim—becomes enchanted with a young woman involved in the underground anti-war movement. Across an ocean in Vietnam, Kip—overwhelmed by the extent of the violence and ill-suited to the constant humiliation of Marine life—finds himself accused of a horrific military crime. Against the wishes of her conservative in-laws, Jeannie becomes consumed by the case and, in the process, is forced to come to terms with the life she’s built. Told in alternating perspectives, the novel takes a while to hit its stride, and the first sections nearly buckle under the weight of so many sepia-toned '60s clichés. But if it begins as a somewhat expected family period piece, the book progresses into something wholly original: dark, rich, and morally challenging.
A haunting portrait of an era that only gets better as it goes along.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08092-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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