by Joanna Smith Rakoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2009
Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when...
Sometimes a novel’s surface weaknesses reveal themselves as underlying strengths. Such is the case with A Fortunate Age, the debut by Joanna Smith Rakoff. The novel initially seems derivative, contrived and cliched. But ultimately it is brilliantly so, subverting all that has inspired it.
In her acknowledgments, the author reserves final credit for, “of course, Mary McCarthy, to whose marvelous novel, The Group, my own is, of course, an homage.” The template of following a group of friends through the travails of early adulthood will forever be associated with McCarthy, but Claire Messud more recently employed the model to greater literary effect with The Emperor’s Children. A similar dynamic has propelled the film The Big Chill and the TV series Friends. Among the conventions of such rites-of-passage narratives are that some of the friends will succeed beyond expectation, some will fall short of their promise and others will couple improbably. Life will not turn out as they’d planned. In Rakoff’s novel, the six friends have moved from Ohio’s Oberlin (where the author attended college) to New York—mainly hipster Brooklyn. The narrative begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. In between, it chronicles six years that are filled with such belief-straining coincidence, startling leaps between cause and effect and shallowness of character that it initially seems that the novelist doesn’t know what she’s doing. Until it becomes obvious that she knows exactly what she’s doing—skewering both the soap-opera conventions of such a narrative and the values of the generation that spawned this one. Clueless offspring of self-righteous boomer parents, these post-slackers stumble into marriage as heedlessly as some drunks stumble into bed. One has fallen in love with an actor buddy from college, until she has a chance encounter with an FBI agent, who loses her when she is impregnated by a hotshot magazine editor turned film director. Another is a promising actress replaced by a bigger name when the production moves to Broadway. She subsequently falls for a married indie-rock singer, moonlights as a bartender so she can make money to care for her previously institutionalized sister, is pursued by a psychiatrist who insists the sister needs further treatment—and then marries the psychiatrist and becomes a doctor herself.
Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when chance encounters don’t lead to life-changing relationships, as if the plot were a literary pinball machine with characters bouncing off each other randomly. Still not sure what they want to be when they grow up, they are well-schooled in the hippest indie labels, the trendiest Brooklyn blocks and the hottest spots to meet for cappuccino, but they have absolutely no idea how to navigate love, marriage and jobs, which they both deride and desire as “a normal life.” Here’s hoping for a sequel, when all of them will be older, and none will be wiser.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9077-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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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