Original and thought-provoking.
The always intriguing Diski (Skating to Antarctica, 1998, etc.) retells the Old Testament of Sarah and Abraham, creating both a moving love story and a postmodern exploration of the idea of narration.
Child of an unnamed concubine and Abraham’s father, Sarah is raised in the respectable house of Shem as a beloved sister. The family consists of prosperous craftsmen, fashioning idols of the various gods worshipped in the city of Ur. Even as a child Sarah loves Abraham, trailing after him in the pesky, devoted custom of a younger sibling. Then, when she’s 13, tragedy strikes: Abraham’s brother desecrates a temple and commits suicide, forcing his shunned family to move through the desert in search of a place that hasn’t heard of their shame. While in the desert the father makes a daring decision: Sarah and Abraham must marry to continue the family line. They have a long, happy union but no children. It is then that God speaks to Abraham, promising the impossible: children through which a nation will be born. Throughout Sarah’s story, the voice of God interrupts—although, as He points out, He is The Word, so there is no narrative that is not His own. These forays into divine elevate a simple revisionist tale to a truly bold exploration of the character of God. The great I AM from which everything comes, God tells of his first mistake, the unforeseen invention of an “us” (Adam and Eve): it’s a mistake that sets Him forever apart from His creation. An “us” doesn’t need an I AM, and the human invention of love, something He never imagined, further alienates master from man and woman. God tries to start over with Noah, but it doesn’t really work, so He then sets His sights on stolid, dutiful Abraham’s love. But there’s a powerful obstacle: the love already existing between a very human “us”—Sarah and Abraham.
Original and thought-provoking.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28054-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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