There’s no doubting Poster’s talent. But this fitfully engaging period piece is undone by its miscalculations and excesses.
It’s common practice to call a promising yet flawed first book a mixed success. This emotionally charged historical novel from Poster (Literature/Oxford Univ.) is a mixed failure.
Set in an unnamed village in the south of England in 1881, it recounts the experiences of John Stannard, a young architect hired through the intervention of a family friend to make extensive repairs to the village’s venerable, structurally compromised church. Stannard’s arrogant hauteur quickly alienates the laborers he hires, and things worsen considerably when one of “his men” is injured owing to Stannard’s error in judgment, and may be unable to support his ailing and impecunious family. Stannard also butts heads with the village minister, who deplores the architect’s disdainful unconcern for bodies buried (and accidentally unearthed) on church property and for decorative artwork that blends Christian and pagan motifs, most glaringly in a luridly erotic “doom painting.” Stannard furthermore fails to resist the blandishments of beautiful Ann Rosewell, whose family has been victimized by both misfortune and a venal wealthy neighbor, though he retreats from challenges the girl hurls at him—and gradually becomes dimly aware of how his own inhumane snobbery has influenced his fate. Poster’s complex characterization of his protagonist (a figure whom readers will love to hate) is brilliantly handled, and the novel’s picturesque setting and its mastery of the details of the “restorer’s” art are impressively rendered. However, the plot is hackneyed beyond belief, and the alacrity with which Stannard succumbs to Ann’s off-putting combination of erotic grace and emotional imbalance is almost embarrassingly unconvincing. In its many weak moments, the book reads like a script for a Monty Python skit.
There’s no doubting Poster’s talent. But this fitfully engaging period piece is undone by its miscalculations and excesses.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-032-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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