THE GREAT GLASS SEA

Name: THE GREAT GLASS SEA
Author: Josh Weil
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2215-5

by Josh Weil ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2014

As broad as its themes are—touching on political, philosophical and historical divisions—Weil’s first novel is rooted in...

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In a Russian city of the near future, twin brothers struggle with tradition, technology and the growing distance between them in this impressive debut novel.

As boys, Yarik and Dima learn fishing from their father. After he drowns and their mother has a breakdown, they spend time on their uncle’s farm. Shared pain and rustic pleasures remain with the twins as the story jumps about 20 years and they work on building a huge greenhouse that girds their once-depressed industrial city of Petroplavilsk. It’s a project of a consortium in the new capitalist Russia that has also filled the sky with space mirrors to reflect the sun when it sets and provide perpetual daylight for crops grown under the “mammoth solarium.” Weil (The New Valley, 2009) has fairy-tale elements and a Pushkin romance weaving through a moderately futuristic setting. The different narrative types suit a conflict that pits high-pressure urban toil and avid consumerism against a “Past Life” of agrarian labor, customs and leisure. The prose also shifts markedly from harshly realistic to lyrical and sometimes poetic, as in this description of a winter’s fishing hole: “[a] lapping blackness in the lamplit ice.” The brothers’ gradual estrangement embodies the larger conflicts. Dima the dreamer, “listening to a woods whispering at the edge of a hayfield,” retreats from work, hoping to recover the uncle’s lost farm and becoming briefly a folk hero as he recites publicly from the Pushkin epic and appears in a video made by a group of anarchists who harvest psilocybin mushrooms. Yarik, with a family and ambition, gains promotions as he’s favored by the billionaire leading the consortium, eventually turning into an icon himself of the good life. The ending errs wisely on the side of realism, addressing the key conflicts without closing all the gaps or healing all the wounds.

As broad as its themes are—touching on political, philosophical and historical divisions—Weil’s first novel is rooted in family and fine storytelling; it's an engaging, highly satisfying tale blessed by sensitivity and a gifted imagination.

Pub Date: July 2, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2215-5

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE AGE OF PERPETUAL LIGHT
by Josh Weil

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NEW VALLEY
by Josh Weil

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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

- AWARDS
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- SEEN & HEARD
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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.