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LIFE IS SHORT BUT WIDE

Name: LIFE IS SHORT BUT WIDE
Author: J. California Cooper
ISBN: 978-0-385-51134-6

by J. California Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2009

Cooper’s manufactured folktale pulls all the expected strings too hard.

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This multigenerational saga about African-Americans in a small Oklahoma town covers a large chunk of the 20th century.

The novel’s 91-year-old narrator, who plays no active role and has no viable reason to know the intimate details of the characters’ stories, allows Cooper (Wild Stars Seeing Midnight Suns, 2006, etc.) to adopt a folksy, sometimes preachy tone—with a decided sympathy for Jehovah’s Witness theology—and a casual approach to dates and facts that might be considered sloppy otherwise. Hattie B. Brown explains that her story is shaped like a “Y,” two strands coming together. The “Strong” line is much more substantially developed. In 1910, Val Strong, a cowboy of mixed African and Native American parentage, marries teacher Irene Lowell and builds her a house in Wideland, Okla., where they raise two daughters. Independent Tante leaves for college back East and never looks back, but passive Rose stays in her parents’ house after their deaths. A teacher like her mother, Rose marries smooth-talking Leroy and has a daughter, Myine Wee, but Leroy takes up with an old girlfriend. Evil Tonya poisons Rose, then knocks off Leroy for good measure so she can claim possession of the house. She turns Myine Wee into a Cinderella stepdaughter servant. Eventually Myine Wee hears from Aunt Tante, now living in France, who swoops into town to save the house and give Myine Wee start-up cash to finish her education and become a teacher. Meanwhile, one of Rose’s best students, Herman Tenderman, is making his way in the world—getting a college degree, joining the navy, working as head mechanic in a garage where he’s paid less than the less-skilled whites, marrying a floozy he eventually leaves. As the years speed by, along with the chapters—and they do speed—Herman and Myine Wee cross paths frequently. Although they are obviously made for each other, not until they are approaching their 60s do they acknowledge their love and complete Ms. Brown’s “Y.”

Cooper’s manufactured folktale pulls all the expected strings too hard.

Pub Date: March 24, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-51134-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WILD STARS SEEKING MIDNIGHT SUNS
by J. California Cooper

- BOOK REVIEW
SOME PEOPLE, SOME OTHER PLACE
by J. California Cooper

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FUTURE HAS A PAST
by J. California Cooper

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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

- 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

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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.