The narrative is powerful and the characters compelling, when the writing doesn’t undermine the novelist’s considerable...
A sardonic novel that seethes with rage, yet lacks the stylistic command to fulfill its ambition.
The sophomore effort from Boice (MVP, 2007) has more power and narrative propulsion than his debut, but it suffers from some jarring shifts in tone. The title refers to northern Virginia, a suburban nowhere satellite of Washington, D.C., where fathers work for the military, mothers teach school or stay home, and teenagers fail to escape the numbness of their existence through getting stoned and having sex. “Starting at puberty, kids in Northern Virginia start going around muttering like a mantra that they hate Northern Virginia and can’t wait to leave,” writes Boice, though his novel leaves little hope that any of them will ever escape, and that even those who make a geographical departure will carry the disease of dead-end American consumerism with them. Meanwhile, most of their parents are leading empty lives in unsatisfying marriages, with some addicted to indiscriminate promiscuity and/or Internet porn. The novel begins on November 2, 1998, with the body of 17-year-old Grayson Donald hanging from a basketball rim. It ends on the same night, in the same place, returning full circle to the graphic details of Grayson’s death. The rest of the narrative shows what led Grayson to this fate, though he doesn’t seem appreciably more disturbed than the rest of his fellow high schoolers leading aimless lives or the parents who are clueless about the lives of their kids (and perhaps their own lives as well). As bleak as this novel may be, there are savagely funny episodes concerning random sex and one surrealistic orgy of serial vomiting. Yet the writing lacks a coherent narrative voice, one that wouldn’t mix dozens of words obscure or invented (“gungulation,” “meshanteries,” “fimetic,” all in the same paragraph) with lazy clichés (“brain fart,” “stinking drunk”).
The narrative is powerful and the characters compelling, when the writing doesn’t undermine the novelist’s considerable promise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7542-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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