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THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM

Not for every taste, but a significant building block in Coe’s adventurous and distinctive oeuvre.

The lonely life of an everyman who might as well be called a nobody is the subject of the popular British author’s ninth novel (The Rain Before It Falls, 2008, etc.).

Late-40-ish Max Sim, on leave while "recovering” from depression from his job as a department store’s customer liaison officer, is estranged from his disapproving wife, Caroline, and his daughter. Despite an array of computerized and other devices that offer connection to everywhere and everyone, Max seems eternally on the periphery of his own story. In fact, we learn about the experiences and influences that have formed him from the testimony of other people. A girl whom Max admires tells him the (real life) story of Donald Crowhurst, the yachtsman who entered a round-the-globe race and promptly disappeared (Max senses an immediate kinship). Caroline, a writer who despairs over Max’s indifference to culture, contributes a mordant fictionalization of a disastrous family vacation. A school essay written by a childhood friend’s sister, and a confessional memoir penned by Max’s absentee father, a would-be poet living in Australia (whence Max returns from a visit at the novel’s outset), complete the array of judgmental perspectives on our antihero’s many, many failings. The story’s central action is Max’s car trip to the Shetland Islands, as a rep delivering a shipment of eco-friendly toothbrushes to a client. It’s a ruefully comic plunge into the unknown, during which Max appears to form a relationship with the voice of his car’s “satnav” (GPS navigational system); so it goes, in the brave new world of instant communication. It’s a risky road for a novel to travel, especially when a postmodernist-metafictional dénouement and ending underscore this book’s peculiar challenges to the reader. Still, like the hero of many a BBC-TV comedy, Max carries on, and may, like the cockroach, outlast all the “normal” people who keep their distances from him.

Not for every taste, but a significant building block in Coe’s adventurous and distinctive oeuvre.

Pub Date: March 11, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-59481-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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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THE SECRET HISTORY

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.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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