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THE MADE-UP MAN

Name: THE MADE-UP MAN
Author: Joseph Scapellato
ISBN: 978-0-374-20007-7

by Joseph Scapellato ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

An aimless story about an aimless young man.

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A mopey 20-something of Polish-American origins agrees to take part in his eccentric uncle’s latest performance-art project.

Here we have a story so common and oft-told it might as well have been pried out of Joseph Campbell’s mitts and summarized down through the ages as “disaffected dude experiences existential angst.” Scapellato (Big Lonesome, 2017) follows up his short story collection with a debut novel about that particular male archetype navel-gazing through his past during a visit to Prague. There’s not much to first-person narrator Stanley, an archaeology-school dropout and historically bad boyfriend prone to saying glum things like “That was when a window in me broke,” and “The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me had expanded.” The only interesting thing about Stanley is the strange set of circumstances he finds himself in. He’s been offered a paying gig by his oddball Uncle Lech: travel to Prague, sit in an apartment for three days, and facilitate a new tenant’s move-in. It sounds simple enough, but Stanley is aware that his wealthy and unethical uncle is prone to staging elaborate events that “hit the intersection of performance art, conceptual art, and the plastic arts.” What might have developed into an elaborate head game doesn’t add up to much—a couple of noir-tinged encounters with camouflaged figures meant to evoke Stanley’s feelings about others and the delivery of envelopes marked “Evidence: Complete Explanation of the Made-Up Man.” Stanley fills the rest of his journey sulking about his ex-girlfriend T, who’s in town to attend a festival, bombing drunkenly around Prague with T’s glib friend Manny, who’s staying with Stanley, and remembering mundane encounters with his girlfriends, brother, and family. By the end, readers will likely agree with Stanley’s mother: “ 'You’re in your twenties,’ she said, meaning, You’re a dupa jasiu.” That dismissal is a Polish colloquialism that translates roughly to “ass.”

An aimless story about an aimless young man.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-20007-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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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.