Confused but cheerful little debut mystery with more shtick than gore.
Straining hard for Catskills-style humor at every turn, Annie Dowd (née Edelstein) is looking for her killer.
You see, Annie drowned mysteriously in the pool of a swanky Long Island mansion just when she was about to get up close and personal with a sexy fellow guest, an Englishman with a cute accent. Life—and death—are incredibly unfair. Just ask her mother: plump Mrs. Edelstein never approved of Annie marrying and then divorcing a certified goy anyway, especially not a globetrotting investigative journalist like Frank Dowd. Nonetheless, her heartrending wails when she learns of her daughter’s untimely demise are enough to break even the hard hearts of the Long Island cops who investigate the case. And so it’s on to likely suspects, beginning with Agnes Spurgeon, iron-willed, 70ish owner of the successful real estate firm where Annie worked as a broker. Annie’s colleagues include Harold Spurgeon, Agnes’s wussy son; Claudia Harmon, man-hungry, 30ish glamour-puss; handsome Matt Sterling, 20ish object of Claudia’s lust, and more. All gather round to speculate on who killed Annie and why. But there’s no better man to get to the bottom of things than fearless Frank, who undertakes an investigation out of lingering love for the dear departed, not noticing that Annie’s spirit has wound itself around his shoulders. She moves on to snuggle with her bereaved mother in the funeral limo, although Annie herself doesn’t mind being dead all that much. She’ll never have to worry about her weight again! Enter an obligatory troupe of Mafia goons to liven things up (well, a little). Annie interferes in her ethereal way to help out with the investigation. Turns out that Harold Spurgeon needed to cover some bad loans before Mommy found out, and a loan shark named Johnny Romano swam over somewhere in the middle of a rather murky plot . . . and Annie just got in the way.
Confused but cheerful little debut mystery with more shtick than gore.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7582-0260-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
