by Jon Clinch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 6, 2010
A journey into the dark that’s more titillating then illuminating.
Three brothers share one bed…all their lives.
Clinch’s second novel spans 60 years but begins at the end, in 1990. Vernon, Audie and Creed Proctor are dairy farmers in upstate New York. Old man Audie, mentally challenged, wakes to find Vernon dead but the bed dry (Vernon was a bedwetter). Creed reports the death, which is deemed suspicious. The urine-soaked mattress is impounded. Might Creed have smothered his brother? The police force a dubious confession from the barely literate Creed. Clinch has incorporated some elements of the 1990 Delbert Ward case, just as E.L. Doctorow used the Collyer brothers, the Proctors’ urban counterparts, for his 2009 novel Homer and Langley. Real life supplied a legal resolution in the Ward case. Not so here. Clinch shuffles time periods as he did in his debut Finn (2007), which featured the monstrous Pap. Lester Proctor, the boys’ father, is almost as evil. A mean drunk, he takes the boys on a fishing expedition and almost drowns Vernon through his negligence. Another time he has Vernon cut off his damaged finger. He regrets he hasn’t killed Audie, the “idiot child.” Facing such brutality, it’s no wonder the boys huddle together protectively. Lester dies young in a mule-and-wagon accident; their beloved mother dies of cancer; little sister Donna gets out fast. The brothers keep the farm going, quaint figures from an earlier time. But don’t get misty-eyed; they’re caked in dung and smell terrible. Clinch uses various voices and viewpoints for his group portrait. The brothers are seen as ants, Okies or cavemen (but never kings). Walking a fine line, not wanting us to dismiss them as freaks, Clinch uses their neighbor Preston to anchor the novel. A kindly soul, Preston respects their willingness to endure. A secondary story line, involving their nephew Tom, a marijuana grower and dealer, is a mistake, distracting us from the sad riddle of the Proctor boys.
A journey into the dark that’s more titillating then illuminating.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6901-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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...
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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