Well-written and atmospheric, but overdetermined and relentlessly grim.
An unhappy teen and a shellshocked widow make a vital connection, though not the one they initially think, in Soffer’s somber debut.
Both 14-year-old Lorca and elderly Victoria are carrying a lot of emotional baggage when they meet. Lorca has just been suspended from school after a fellow student finds her cutting herself—a practice, we soon learn, to which she is helplessly addicted. Victoria’s husband, Joseph, has just died after a long illness, and she is haunted by guilt about the baby she gave up for adoption against his wishes many years ago. Lorca’s real problem is her impenetrably self-absorbed mother, a successful Manhattan chef who prevents the girl from maintaining any connection with her long-divorced husband and frequently stays out late drinking with her equally unnurturing sister. Mom’s only response to her daughter’s desperate attempts to win her favor by cooking wonderful meals is to criticize them, so when Lorca hears her tell Aunt Lou that her favorite dish ever was masgouf, a baked fish “from an Iraqi restaurant that’s closed now,” she determines to track it down and learn to make it perfectly. It turns out that the restaurant belonged to Joseph and Victoria, whose pushy neighbor Dottie has just persuaded her to give cooking lessons. Conveniently, Lorca is the only student who shows up, and these two painfully lonely souls not only bond over food, but become convinced that Lorca’s mother (who was adopted) must be Victoria’s abandoned daughter. The truth is a lot more complicated and won’t be arrived at until there have been several more instances of Lorca’s ghastly self-harming (described in gruesome detail) and of her mother’s incredible callousness. (“I don’t know what you want me to do,” she says, watching her daughter burn her arm with a lighter.) The plot twists are too obvious and the characters too predictable for the tentatively hopeful ending to be very persuasive.
Well-written and atmospheric, but overdetermined and relentlessly grim.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-75926-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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
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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