Lots of steam but no real heat, from the ever-shameless Collins (Infamous, 1996, etc.).
Clunky potboiler from the former queen of B-movies and TV soaps, starring the descendants of a humble Irish housemaid who reach the heights of Hollywood stardom.
Young Millie McClancey, orphaned by the 1917 influenza epidemic, takes a job in the London house of a duke—and gets noticed by his dissolute son, who can’t resist her flame-red curls, cerulean eyes, and whatnot. Her ruination begins innocently enough: Tobias Swannell, handsome, swaggering heir to the dukedom and all its properties, loves to hear the sweet young thing sing music-hall airs, but her impromptu concerts lead to significant fooling around on the sofa. Pregnant and disgraced, Millie is cast out by the stern butler, then befriended by an elderly (and fortunately homosexual) theater producer, who puts her on the stage and arranges for someone else to care for her illegitimate daughter. Soon the toast of London and then New York, Millie throws all her energy into her career, warbling away in near-nudity and thrilling audiences that include sexy gangster Marco Novello. Millie’s inevitable slide into drink and depression—and her mysterious death in an explosion—put her daughter Vickie next in line for stardom, aided by Marco. Not getting the role of Scarlett O’Hara is a setback, but pin-up fame during WWII awaits, plus innumerable parts in lousy movies. Much-married Vickie moves on to the perverted grandson of the dissolute duke, not knowing that there’s an incestuous link. Her daughter Lulu, sired by the love of her life (a Gary Cooper clone), becomes a world-famous model known for her sultry sensuality and lesbian affairs. As a child, she accidentally saw the Cooper clone banging away lustily at her naked Mummy, turning her off men forever—except for one hot night with a paid superstud, resulting in a daughter, also Millie, who becomes an overnight rock superstar at 14.
Lots of steam but no real heat, from the ever-shameless Collins (Infamous, 1996, etc.).Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2002
ISBN: 1-4013-0000-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
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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