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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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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.

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.