Remember Ayla, the Cro-Magnon orphan who was raised by a tribe of less-evolved Neanderthals in Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)? Well, now, having been cursed and exiled by new tribe leader Broud (who raped her), Ayla must abandon baby Durc and go searching for her own species ("The Others"). So off she goes to the Eurasian North—on foot and alone. . . until she reaches the Valley of the Horses, finding "a nice cave" where she can settle in for the winter. And about half of this novel (#2 in Auel's Earth's Children series) details Ayla's self-help progress in the wild: she refines her already-impressive hunting and nursing abilities; she nurtures a foal ("Whinney"), discovers a neat trick called horseback-riding, invents the travois; she accidentally learns how to make Cure via stone-sparking; she mothers a baby lion ("Baby"), she becomes the world's first female to braid her hair; and she frets about the whole matter of mating—which, despite her past experiences, she doesn't quite understand. Meanwhile, however, in alternating chapters, Ayla's obviously-destined Super-Mate is on his way. This is big blond Jondalar of the Zelandonii, who reluctantly sets out on a Journey with young, impetuous brother Thonolan: they follow the "Great Mother River" (they're from an advanced, Mother-worshipping clan that scorns the Neanderthal "flatheads" as "animals"); along the way, Jondalar helps a friendly clan with his special expertise at deflowering virgins (" 'Jondalar man, Noria woman,' he said huskily. . ."); when Thonolan is wounded by a rhino, they're taken in by the Sharamudoi, a hunting/fishing/boating tribe that Thonolan eventually marries into; but, after Thonolan's wife and child die, the brothers travel on again. Eventually, then, they reach the Valley of the Horses—where Thonolan is promptly killed by Baby (who's no baby anymore). . . while Jondalar, seriously wounded, is nursed back to health by Ayla. Will these two find mating magic? Of course. But first Jondalar must teach culturally deprived Ayla how to speak—and must overcome his revulsion when he learns that Ayla is the mother of a half-flathead. (His anti-flathead outburst brings out the Barbara Stanwyck in a now-articulate Ayla: "If I could make a choice between human and animal, I'd take the stinking hyenas!") So finally, quarrels resolved, Ayla is introduced to Jondalar-style mating, oral sex is invented ("Oh, woman! . . . How did you learn to do that!"), and Ayla gets ready to join semi-civilization. As before, Auel's dialogue is often hiloriously anachronistic, suggesting a Saturday Night Live cave-man sketch. And Ayla's sugary chats with Whinney and Baby are on the icky-juvenile level. But, though this has less tribal texture than Cave Bear, the anthropological details and the hard-core sex again make an earthy combination—so Ayla followers can probably be expected to return for more Stone Age action.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1982
ISBN: 0553381660
Page Count: -
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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