A spirited vision of America and its national game.
Janko (Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, 2006) delivers a meditative and lyrical baseball novel.
Billy Donachio is the bench coach for the National League pennant-winning 2018 Chicago Cubs, a fictional version of the team with glancing parallels to real life. Similar parallels reign in the novel’s political world, in which semiauthoritarian Republican President Michael J. Trent runs for re-election against surprise Democratic candidate Khadijah Jamil, a Muslim woman from Chicago’s South Side. Donachio is a perennial loser—a lifelong coach who never quite made it as a player; for every team he’s played with, he seems to have been bad luck. However, as the Cubs head into a World Series matchup with the Boston Red Sox, he’s heartened by his team’s unique trio of stars: Johnny Stompiano, an irrepressible base-stealer and political activist; Hector Jesús Mijango Cruz, an openly gay slugger; and Arshan “Azzy” Azzam, the team’s ace pitcher. All three are devoted to bringing a sense of poetry back to the game—quite literally, in the form of verse on video billboards outside Wrigley Field—and are devoted to Jamil’s controversial candidacy. As the series progresses, Donachio becomes increasingly attached to two orphan boys, Sam and Jackie, who he believes are the team’s good-luck charms, and he also begins to steal notes and letters from his players’ lockers. These notes, full of poetry and philosophy, inspire Donachio and the Cubs to new, yet precarious, heights. Janko’s prose is by turns thoughtful and poetic, and over the course of the story, he weaves together a multitude of voices, including Donachio’s inner monologue, rat-a-tat-tat dugout chatter, shock-jock radio play-by-play, and the unceasing roar of the fans. Each character has his or her own finely wrought cadence, and their actions throughout the plot are all believable and well-earned. The version of America that Janko imagines here can strain credulity at times; no ballplayer has ever spoken like these do (Azzy says of Satchel Paige: “Old as he was, he whipped hot strikes burning down the heavens”), and the political race swings wildly. However, the authorial brio is enough to keep readers engaged and entranced.
A spirited vision of America and its national game.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936970-51-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: New Issues
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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