A beautifully written and emotionally complex movie tale that lacks a coherent point of view.
A debut novel about the silent film era explores love, lechery, and the importance of storytelling.
Almost overnight, motion pictures have taken over American entertainment—and every lost soul has dreams of making it big. Sidney Thrall’s attention to detail and ability to spot talent catapult him into working with his Uncle Jacob Lasky at Lasky-Famous Players. But then Sidney leaves Lasky for Judah Ben Mayer’s studio, even though he’s perfectly aware of the magnate’s notorious reputation for ruthless manipulation. For Sidney and Judah, movies are more than a job. Films give Sidney the chance to bring to life the tales that sustained him as a sickly kid and drove him to want to become the hero. For Judah, movies remain a source of joy and anger, where he can place his most debased alter-ego on the screen for all to see. But Sidney’s and Judah’s lives intertwine in more ways than one. Both men are fascinated by actress Nina Michaels. Judah cast her years ago in a small role in exchange for sexual favors but now Sidney falls in love with this mysterious woman who reminds him of his childhood. And Judah can’t ignore her because she and Sidney have one thing the studio czar’s money and luck can’t buy: love. Shankman is an actor, playwright, and novelist. He studs his intricate tale with lovely prose, detailed enough to depict every inch of a movie frame that a protagonist walks through: “On either side of him the land is rolling mudlike hillocks with tufts of dead wood, stumps, rising out of the grunge, rolling away like a nightmare in the glare of a falsely illuminated night and once in a while the pitted thin remnant of a tree trunk like a gallows waiting patiently for a criminal dawn.” The author boldly uses point of view like a camera lens, following Sidney one moment, Judah the next, and then suddenly switching to a stream-of- consciousness, first-person narration by Nina. Unfortunately, this experimentation sometimes leaves the audience confused about the compelling characters’ basic thoughts and actions. The author’s inventiveness does not always pay off.
A beautifully written and emotionally complex movie tale that lacks a coherent point of view.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5373-7637-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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