A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.
This extensive revision of Oates’s second novel, published in 1967 and nominated for a National Book Award, breathes new life into a precociously brilliant book that probably deserves a place among the classics of American naturalist fiction.
The triptych focuses on the life of its “white trash” protagonist Clara Walpole, born the daughter of Kentucky migrant laborers. In the opening section, “Carleton,” Clara’s overworked, embittered young father experiences his growing family’s immersion in squalor, the loss of his eternally pregnant wife Pearl, and an emotional intimacy with his “favorite” child that sends him in search of the runaway Clara, with catastrophic consequences. “Lowry” is the phlegmatic vagrant who takes Clara to upstate New York (and Oates’s subsequently familiar fictional Eden Valley), fathers her son Steven (a.k.a. Swan), and abandons her to a relationship with married agricultural entrepreneur Curt Revere, who becomes her lover and her keeper. Swan tells Clara and his own story as the kept woman rises to respectability, the violence that seethed through Carleton reasserts itself in even his timid, bookish grandson, and Clara sinks into premature stasis and senility. As her thoughtful afterword explains, Oates has, in addition to reshaping particular incidents and emphases, enhanced this already potent story by replacing its original omniscient narrative voice with accents more closely aligned with her characters’ thoughts and speech. The resulting characterizations are unusually full and rich, and the sense of an implacable brute nemesis working its way through the Walpole generations is unerringly precise. Oates excels when depicting Clara’s sensual, earthy appetitive energies, and her portrayal of the hapless Swan’s self-destructive momentum, his feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one, is almost beyond praise. The gritty, insistent prose that has recently hardened too often into mannerism, here vibrates with revelatory clarity.
A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8129-6834-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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