Purdy (The Candle of Your Eyes, 1987, etc. etc.) comes home with his first American publication in more than a decade, a stupendous elegy on the silences of love. In suburban Chicago in an indeterminate past—probably the ’40s—Victor and Carrie Kinsella move through the bric- a-brac of their North Shore lives without much evidence of purpose or pleasure. Prosperous enough in an old-money sort of way, they grumble at each other as old couples are wont to do and spend most of their time talking at cross-purposes or trading accusations. Their daughter Gertrude—now some years dead—was an artist whose bohemian rebelliousness kept them both well at bay during her short life and now makes her absence all the more difficult to bear, especially for Carrie. “Behind all this tame, insipid life we were leading on Stony Island Avenue, there was something after all mysterious, strange, and yes frightening.” And Carrie means to find out what it is. To begin with, she discovers that her husband—“Daddy,” as she calls him—is secretly compiling a massive and nonsensical record of his childhood and youth, entitled “Index of Forgotten Items.” So she leaves Daddy, moves in with a friend, and persuades Daddy’s lawyer Cy Mellerick—once Gertrude’s lover—to show her her daughter’s secret world. “Around me I saw a terrible Chicago I had previously barely glanced at,” which in actual fact was a Chicago of passions: of jazz and painting and liquor and sex. “A city of fearful energy and confusion, ceaseless change and sunless sky.” And in a climax that she had anticipated least of all, Carrie sees Gertrude’s art . . . and faints. Afterward, she understands her daughter, and herself, for the first time: —I was like some strange winged creature coming out of its cocoon.” A rare triumph: as elegant in its simplicity of tone as it is moving in its purity of feeling, Purdy’s work deserves to place its author in the first rank of contemporary writers.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15901-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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