An offbeat, honest take on romance that offers cringes and laughs in equal supply.
Warrington tells the story of a memorably mismatched couple in her debut novel.
Clifford is 54, newly divorced and stretched beyond his financial means. He has a body that’s failing him and an elderly mother who insists that he murdered his infant brother more than 40 years ago. Meanwhile, Gina has two children from her abusive first marriage and a third from an affair, as well as plenty of regrets, a dearth of confidence, and a desire to find love again. When the two meet online, they find an immediate affinity—although perhaps it’s a warning sign that Gina is attracted to Clifford’s frank negativity. At first, it seems as if the two may form a perfect partnership, as they commiserate over how life seems to delight in tormenting people. But when the chaos of their respective lives begins to butt in, their personal flaws make for a difficult love affair. They must decide whether a relationship is actually possible and, if so, if it’s really worth the effort. Clifford is delightfully repugnant: selfish, reactionary, angry, and self-pitying. He’s an addition to the pantheon of somehow-lovable, angry, middle-aged British men in literature. Gina is more sympathetic, yet she possesses her own rich collection of shortcomings that make her a vigorous character. The couple’s vitality gives the novel a human center, which makes the plot feel effortless and organic. Warrington’s prose is as sharp and unadorned as her characters, and it’s laden with the wry cynicism of someone who isn’t interested in peddling romantic fantasies. Much of the book’s humor comes from the delight it takes in humbling its characters (“His body was a bendy metal coathanger performing a very poor job of supporting his weighty clothing”). Although the ending isn’t a complete surprise, there’s still something quite satisfying in it. Overall, this is the story of a modern, dysfunctional, second-chance sort of love—the kind that people don’t necessarily expect or desire. It may, however, be just the sort of love that has the most to teach people about dignity, charity, compassion, and trust.
An offbeat, honest take on romance that offers cringes and laughs in equal supply.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502778901
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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