THE SONG OF THE EARTH

Name: THE SONG OF THE EARTH
Author: Hugh Nissenson
ISBN: 1-56512-298-4

by Hugh Nissenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 2001

Not a story that will move readers, though a cool fascination awaits them on every page. And then there are Nissenson’s...

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After 16 years, Nissenson returns with a futuristic tale that lacks the charm of his extraordinary Tree of Life (1985) but still has the compelling interest typical in Nissenson.

American artist John Firth Baker is born in 2037, genetically engineered so that, as his art-historian mother fervently wishes, he’ll have “the lust of the eyes” and be brilliant in manual art (not mere “digital,” mind you). The engineering has been done by American scientist Frederick Rust Plowman at the Ozaki Metamorphic Institute of Kyoto: a place chosen in order to evade the strictures of the “Created Equal Act,” a US law passed in 2030 prohibiting “the artificial alteration of genetically determined traits in humins except for reasons of health.” With this wry twist on today’s reproductive preoccupations, Nissenson gets his story moving—in an America where “womin” and “humin” are spelled, well, that way; all but the poor live in “keeps” (whole towns sealed off from the insufferably hot, dust-driven weather); and global warming is turning the avenues of Manhattan into canals. The story of Baker’s short life is told through pieces of diary, excerpts from an interview in The International Review of Manual Art, and snippets of monologue from various people who knew him—including the sleazy guru Billy Lee Mookerjee, a leader in the Gaian religion whom the infatuated young Baker follows, serving Billy as a “sheila” and even growing breasts (as a “he-she”) to prove his fidelity to the earth-principle. But the religion stifles—even forbids—Baker’s work as an artist, and only after he wrenches himself away from Billy Lee does his career flourish and fame come quickly, though bringing a lamentable end to the young genius.

Not a story that will move readers, though a cool fascination awaits them on every page. And then there are Nissenson’s pictures, 34 line drawings scattered throughout, so brilliant that it seems the book were made to illustrate them, not vice-versa.

Pub Date: May 11, 2001

ISBN: 1-56512-298-4

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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...

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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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.