Devin (Elephant Girl, 2011) offers a story of a kindhearted man who struggles throughout his life with the weaknesses and selfishness of others.
This picaresque tale follows Easton McNeil, a short, baby-faced man who’s missing half his left leg. Readers first meet him as a child, bouncing between foster homes after he was taken from his parents due to their addictions and criminal pursuits. Easton overcomes a series of early setbacks, including the loss of his leg, before he graduates college and purchases a small home with money he made by selling a website he created. He strikes up a friendship with a neighborhood girl named Liberty whose family struggles parallel his own. Easton, who has an unexpectedly strong paternal instinct, becomes a kind of surrogate father to the girl even though her manipulative mother tries to poison their relationship. Later, Easton works for a well-known radio shock jock, takes an extended, meandering road trip from coast to coast, and begins his first true romance in his late 30s. The plot is episodic to a fault, but readers will remain engaged thanks to Devin’s deft characterizations. She displays a remarkable knack for developing pathos in even minor characters—and Easton’s curiosity and wanderlust bring him into contact with many. Easton himself proves to be more complex and less saccharine-sweet than he initially appears. The novel’s greatest accomplishment, however, is the way it balances sentimentality with misanthropy: Most of the characters prove to be duplicitous, base and almost unbearably selfish, but Devin’s approach doesn’t wallow in their faults, instead focusing on small, potent moments of connection and redemption. At times, the novel risks becoming overly sentimental, particularly during the late romance, but it never does so thanks to the author’s refusal to take the story down obvious paths. She develops characters that readers will care about and places them in a fantastical story that feels entirely real and possible.
A strong first novel from an author with potential.
Pub Date: May 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494974107
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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