Bound to prompt fruitful discussion.
One life takes off in two directions in Cohen's (Dear Thing, 2016, etc.) provocative novel.
In 1978, a baby is born to Peggy and Irving Alder in the little paper mill town of Casablanca, Maine. In one universe, the baby is a girl named Louise; in a parallel one, a boy named Louis. Apart from gender, the two kids are exactly alike. They share “eye color, hair color, the curve of their smile, myopia, a mole on their thigh, a propensity to hay fever, their future love for salty food and science fiction.” But the difference in gender means a difference in the way they're treated by those around them, including their best friends, twins Allie and Benny, and thus in the way their lives unfold. Cohen (Together, 2017, etc.) jumps nimbly between the two stories, starting with a brief section on the characters' childhoods and then leaping to 2010, when Louise is a single mother working as a teacher in New York and Louis, on the edge of leaving a troubled marriage, has just finished writing his first novel. Both are bisexual, and both head back to Casablanca when they learn that their mother is dying of cancer. There, they come to terms with the differing events that led them to leave the town precipitously just after high school graduation. While the book's dialogue can be stilted and its plot occasionally melodramatic, Cohen explores her premise with curiosity and the kind of openness that recognizes that both those identified as male and those as female are limited by restrictive gender definitions. As compelling as the premise is, this is never simply a novel of ideas but a story about particular people in a specific place and time. Especially intriguing and carefully worked out are the Lous' relationships with Allie and Benny, with some aspects of those relationships shaped by gender and others transcending it.
Bound to prompt fruitful discussion.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4091-7984-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
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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