AFTER THE BLUE HOUR

Name: AFTER THE BLUE HOUR
Author: John Rechy
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2589-7

by John Rechy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2017

Grown-up stuff, with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of–Henry James subplot. Beautifully written but surely not for the faint of...

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Novelist Rechy, still best known for his 1963 debut, City of Night, returns with a steamy tale that, had it appeared then, might well have been banned.

Rechy’s 2008 book, About My Life and the Kept Woman, was subtitled “An Autobiographical Memoir,” which seems rather oddly redundant. His latest is subtitled “A True Fiction,” by which we might assume that the facts are more or less factual while some of the names have been changed to protect the—well, the anything but innocent. The narrator, a young man who just happens to be named John Rechy, is summoned to the coast for an island retreat with a wealthy patron who has read and admired Rechy’s work. “When I read your stories,” says the mysteriously wealthy Paul, “I felt—I know what it’s like to live by one’s wits. That’s how I’ve lived my life, my adult life.” Throw the emphasis on “adult,” and wits hardly enter into the picture, though con games, spectacles of domination, and violations of various laws of the day certainly figure prominently; though decidedly literary, there are plenty of moments where Rechy’s recountings turn from PG into hard X, with rompings and barkings that wouldn’t be out of place in a Frank Harris fan’s hidden-from-the-kids bookshelf. Paul is infinitely curious and demanding as well as being a touch more perceptive about some things than the less worldly John Rechy: when discussing the ways and wherefores of the male hustler, for instance, he intones that the real business at hand is power: “Power, of course, man, sexual power. You wanted power over willing victims.” The sensitive reader will note that power is the currency here, but just how willing some of the victims are is a topic for discussion, at least in the spaces between every possible variation on human coupling.

Grown-up stuff, with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of–Henry James subplot. Beautifully written but surely not for the faint of heart.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2589-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ABOUT MY LIFE AND THE KEPT WOMAN
by John Rechy

- BOOK REVIEW
THE COMING OF THE NIGHT
by John Rechy

- BOOK REVIEW
OUR LADY OF BABYLON
by John Rechy

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
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.