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WHAAM!

Name: WHAAM!
Author: John Gardiner
ISBN: 978-0-646-49665-8

by John Gardiner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2008

Students of yesteryear counterculture may claim this as their new favorite book.

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A topsy-turvy, kaleidoscopic journey through the 1960s by Australian-born writer John Gardiner.

The title of this tome–some 398 pages of stream-of-consciousness narrative–gets at its essential energy, which is raw, sinuous and colorful. Ostensibly, Gardiner follows a motley crew of characters through the chaos of the late ’60s, from the student free-speech movement to the anti-war protests, to the drugs, booze and colorful rock music that lent the decade its lush sonic backdrop. But this is not a history book or a memoir. In fact, it owes little to any traditional form of storytelling. Instead, the reader is dropped headfirst into a stew of sensory experiences, divided roughly by year into sections: 1968, 1969 and finally 1970, when the whole wild decade finally bowed its shaggy head. The language resembles, in some ways, the musical speak-sing of the Beats. The characters, with wonderfully theatrical names like Bridget Lovegrove and Christopher Featherstone, are always pushing at the edges of the world. They observe and interact at a rapidfire pace, describing sunsets, geometry and obscure religious theory with equal aplomb. For good measure, the author tosses in some plot pieces from â€œParadise Lost” by John Milton and explores the minutiae of quantum physics, all while watching his set pieces swell and ebb under the force of his heavy academic language. The problem with WHAAM! is that there’s very little plot. Featherstone, for instance, drifts in and out of the chapters without much motivation. Readers never understand what he wants, where he came from or where exactly he’ll end up. Instead, a shapeless poeticism takes over, absorbing the characters and the book’s direction. Yet this shapelessness makes Gardiner’s book what it is–like the decade the author evokes, WHAAM! is endlessly colorful and wonderfully strange.

Students of yesteryear counterculture may claim this as their new favorite book.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-646-49665-8

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2011

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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.