This tale of a madness as terrifying as it is logical, simple and classical in its tragic lines, is also a complex rendering...
by Jane Rogers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2000
An embittered young woman journeys to a small island in the Scottish Hebrides to confront her past, by murdering the mother who abandoned her as a newborn, in Rogers's brooding, furiously powerful tale (Mr. Wroe’s Virgins, 1999, etc.).
She calls herself Nikki Black, but when her mother left her, in 1968, at the door of a London post office, her name was Susan Lovage. At 29, after years of foster homes and being asked to move on, of learning how to be manipulative and never being quite good enough at it, and after failure upon failure, for hard-boiled Nikki her life has but a single defining moment: being dropped on the doorstep. She hates her birth mother with a warped passion, and when she finally manages to track her down, she all but salivates at the prospect of killing her. The Hebridean island where Mumsy Phyllis lives, Aysaar, is not hard to reach, and Nikki easily takes a room at her house with no one the wiser, but here the plot thickens: Nikki meets her younger half-brother. Calum is an innocent, simple-minded man, content to do little more than comb the shore and collect everything he finds into huge piles around his house, but in him are stories and fables galore, eager to be told. As he takes Nikki exploring all over the island and they pour out of him, she learns also that he has had trouble with Phyllis, an aloof, controlling figure, an herbalist slowly being ravaged by cancer. With her murderous scheme now modified to take Calum away from Phyllis before killing her, Nikki, in a confused state, tries to seduce her brother. From that point on, however, all her feverishly laid plans go awry.
This tale of a madness as terrifying as it is logical, simple and classical in its tragic lines, is also a complex rendering of the art of storytelling, where history and invention seem to purposefully converge, each to transform the other.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-076-6
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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by Pat Conroy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 1986
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
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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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