Without qualification: take the road to Esmeralda.
Second-novelist Nicholson (The Tribes of Palos Verdes, 1997) blends the trenchant politics of Barbara Kingsolver with the emotional insight of Sue Miller.
Nick Sperry, a charming journalist with alcoholic tendencies, decides to take a long vacation and write the novel he’s been playing with for ten years. He and his girlfriend Sarah head to Mexico, where they try out some largish resort towns, but find themselves sickened by the tourist scene. Mexicans and Europeans alike are fluent in anti-American criticism (the story’s set at the beginning of the recent Iraq war, and its portrayal of international hostility toward the gringos is one of its great strengths). The two finally land at the remote Gasthaus Esmeralda, a curious inn run by the even more curious Karl Von Tollman and located in the middle of a “patch of Mexican jungle. . . crafted into a Little Bavaria.” Nicholson quickly delves into psychological terrain. Nick’s writer’s block is about unresolved issues with his racist, militaristic father: a predictable- and potentially trite-sounding theme that Nicholson handles with sophistication. Too, in Esmeralda, Sarah turns confessional. Increasingly furious about American imperialism, she wants to stay in Mexico and take up the cause of endangered animals. She reveals that she quit her meaningless tech job two months earlier, and has been supporting herself selling family heirlooms. She’s not the only one out of work: shortly before their trip, she ran into Nick’s boss at the grocery store—and he apprised her of his plans to fire Nick. Not to mention that, but, unbeknownst to Nick, she’s been in treatment for clinical anxiety. Oh, and there’s the fact that Sarah has taken a $20,000 cash advance from their credit cards. Circumstances spiral down from there. Still, the tale remains taut and suspenseful as Nick and Sarah find themselves ensnared in a tangle of politics and drugs.
Without qualification: take the road to Esmeralda.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-26863-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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