Bullying narcissists make poor company, and the refusal to allow this one to learn anything is a risky authorial move.
Bestselling Spanish author Navarro (Shoot, I'm Already Dead, 2013, etc.) details the life choices of an unpleasant character in this aptly titled novel.
Thomas Spencer reflects on his past because he knows he's dying. "Tonight I am overwhelmed by memories of my life, and they all leave the taste of bile in my mouth." "As I look death in the face, I'll go over what I have lived through. I know what I did, and what I should have done." As a child of privilege growing up in New York City, he torments his nanny and frames his teacher. He tries to kill his little brother by pushing him out the window, then to separate his parents by convincing his father his mother is having an affair (she isn't). Later, he becomes an adman and moves on to blackmail, affairs, domestic violence, political machinations. He describes himself as "scum," "a scorpion." Other characters call him "a miserable bastard...a son of a bitch," "a man with no principles." When his mother dies of cancer: "I searched within myself for some emotion, but I couldn't feel a thing." He imagines the way each pivotal scene would have gone if he'd acted differently, but: "I wasn't struck with remorse for a single moment." This goes on for more than 800 pages, and the writing often feels banal. Of sex with a "high-end" prostitute he later drives to suicide: "It was a voyage of discovery into sensations I did not know existed." Of the differences between New York and London: "New Yorkers are more communicative and less formal than the British." There are dark plot twists, but the central question remains the same. "I can't stop asking myself if this life would have been better, the one I didn't want to live because I preferred to be a son of a bitch....But I never wanted to be anything other than what I am."
Bullying narcissists make poor company, and the refusal to allow this one to learn anything is a risky authorial move.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-97325-7
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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