Lethem in a minor key. Not without its ridiculous charms, but nothing to sing about either.
A Jonathan Lethem novel about the rock scene is rather like a Norman Mailer novel about Jesus Christ. We kind of knew it would happen eventually.
In this one, set in contemporary L.A., Lucinda Hoekke, nearing 30, still drifting lazily through life, summons her boyfriend, zoo employee and sex magnet Matthew Plangent, to a break-up meeting at a museum where the non-art (a large white enclosure) of Lucinda’s former lover Falmouth Strand is displayed. Working as a “complaint receptionist” for Falmouth (a New Age control freak entrepreneur who offers such service, seemingly just for the hell of it), Lucinda finds herself attracted to the “brilliant complainer” who arouses her recently diminished sex drive, and seeks him out—when not rehearsing with the (unnamed) band that features Matthew as vocalist, Lucinda on bass, confrontational Denise Urban (who sells sex toys at a “Masturbation Boutique”) on drums and gentle Jesus-like eccentric Bedwin Greenish, who plays lead guitar and writes the songs. There’s a minimal plot, in which Lucinda and the complainer (burly, aging Carl Vogelsong) get it on exhaustively, and the band—when not considering and discarding monikers like “Famous Vomit Ferry or Long-Term Pity Houseguest”—catches a break when invited to perform on midnight deejay Fancher Autumnbreast’s radio show “The Dreaming Jaw,” only to be sabotaged by the complainer, whose random musings have been appropriated by Lucinda and turned into song. After much air-headed conversation about “universal principles and…rock trivia,” and the return to the zoo of the morose kangaroo Matthew has held “hostage,” it all spins to a very downbeat (and not very good) bittersweet ending. Lucinda finds herself approximately where she started, and realizes she’s okay with it.
Lethem in a minor key. Not without its ridiculous charms, but nothing to sing about either.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-51218-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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