Straight from the ivory tower—here's the ultimate, unreadable academic novel, and, sadly, the fiercest ammunition imaginable for John Gardner's self-righteous "moral fiction" crusade. In a grand gesture of self-advertisement and apparent desperation, Barth has taken characters from five of his six previous books—Todd Andrews from The Floating Opera, Jacob Homer from The End of the Road, Adolph Mensch from Lost in the Funhouse, Jerome (Harold) Bray from Giles Goat-Boy, various descendants of Ebenezer Cooke (The Sot-Weed Factor)—and he has them all writing letters in 1969: aging Todd writes to his dead father about the recurring patterns of his life and his rediscovery of sex with old flame Jane Mack and (probably incest) Jane's daughter Jeannine; Jacob Homer writes to himself in the loony bin, obsessed with numbers, anniversaries, and his tragic past; Bray and his LILYVAC II continue to pursue fiction-by-computer and write John Barth to threaten him with a plagiarism suit over Giles Goat-Boy; Adolph Mensch outlines his plan for a Perseus fiction; and the various Cookes chronicle the family history from about 1750 to 1820, which takes in Teeumseh, Byron, Madame de Stael, Fulton, the Burning of Washington, the Battle of New Orleans, and a plan to rescue Napoleon from Elba. But the biggest letter-writer of all is a new character, 50-year-old Germaine G. Pitt (Lady Amherst)—acting provost of Marshyhope State University, long-ago mistress to Joyce, Huxley, and Hesse ("he liked me to dress in lederhosen"), now the lustily Joycean mistress of Adolph Mensch, and related in one precious way or another to all the other characters. Plus: Barth himself writes to all these folks, asking their permission to put them in his new book, promising that, through these 88 letters and 864 pages, "Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward. . . ." Unfortunately, that's not what happens, despite a highly contrived effort to connect these characters and bring them together for some campus/radical/terrorist hoopla. Nor do Barth's much-proclaimed themes here—life's second cycles, history's "reenactments"—hold things together; and the comedy/parody is more often strained than wild, especially since such literary gamesplaying is by now old stuff (Borges, Nabokov) that's been improved upon by Barthelme, Sorrentino, and even Woody Allen. What remains is a self-indulgent mishmash that not only fails but also puts an odd retroactive taint on the earlier novels: by shoving his past conceits up against each other, Barth reveals just how frail they all are—and that his various voices, whatever the ornate embellishments, are essentially just one wordy, arch, allusive voice. For Barth's fellow academics, then: an elaborate playpen to crawl around in. For those who know and love all of the earlier novels—some possible amusement. For most everyone else—a sorry spectacle, baroque and listless, noisy and busy and smug and empty.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1979
ISBN: 1564780619
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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