The great tradition of hard-boiled crime novels finds new and promising territory in the Utah desert.
Carrying its own cult following after having been published independently last year, this debut novel is a stirring, atmospheric, and even mildly surreal variation on the “mean streets” detective fiction of Raymond Chandler; only it’s not “mean streets” here so much as a stretch of desolate highway—State Road 117—in northern Utah. The loners, drifters, dreamers, ranchers, and survivors who live along this road get almost all their supplies from Ben Jones, a strapping, half-Indian, half-Jewish independent trucker whose sense of humor is as dry and (almost) as bleak as the surrounding landscape. One day, Ben breaks from his daily routine long enough to notice the scattered remains of a half-built housing development whose only completed building “stuck out like a sturdy tooth on an empty gum.” The first time he passes by, he suspects a woman’s squatting there but can’t quite make her out beyond remembering an “oddly striking” face; the second time, he gets a much better look: the same woman, naked, sitting on the porch, playing a cello without strings; the third time, as you might have expected, she’s pointing a gun at him. And we’re off and running on a witty, rollicking, and somewhat bent mystery/romance whose mostly supporting cast includes an itinerant preacher who spends his life lugging a large wooden cross up and down the highway, a pregnant-and-sassy Wal-Mart clerk taking economics college courses, a reality TV producer whose offer to make Ben a star may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and, most important of all, the widowed septuagenarian owner/operator of the novel’s eponymous diner, an empty but well-maintained relic of better days, much like its volatile, two-fisted proprietor whose coarse belligerence cloaks many secrets, at least one of which is literally too awful to behold.
Anderson dedicates his book in memory of such masters of hard-boiled noir as Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, and James Crumley, and it’s the latter’s gift for poetic description, antic violence, and roadside gothic that resounds most in what one hopes will be the beginning of a beautiful series.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90652-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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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