The latest offering from British novelist Myerson (The Touch, 1996, etc.) is a heartrending account of a young woman’s journey into her own past. Amy is one of those unhappy women who have been unhappy for so long that they can—t ever remember feeling any other way. Orphaned as young girl when her mother drowned off the Greek island of Eknos, Amy never knew her father and was raised by foster parents in the north of England. Now a waitress in the unnamed city where she grew up, she lives with her unnamed husband but secretly turns tricks in a nearby park. She may be desperate, but it’s not for money (most of which she leaves untouched in a private bank account) and it’s certainly not for sex (which she frankly admits to never having enjoyed very much). One day her strange routine is upset by a customer (at the restaurant) who tells her he’s seen her in the park and would like to have a “chat” with her. His name is Harris, and he claims that Amy’s mother had been his lover before she fell for the rather wild boy who dragged her off to Europe and impregnated (and later abandoned) her. Harris wants Amy to meet a special friend of his named Gary. Gary runs a bookshop out of Harris’s home, and he’s quite fat. Another customer? Amy is willing to put out for Gary—who turns out to be quite sweet—but something happens that she’s not prepared for: they fall in love. Eventually, Amy leaves her husband and gives birth to Gary’s child. It turns out that Gary has secrets of his own, however, which he reveals to Amy with great trepidation. Everything goes back to Greece somehow, and soon enough Amy must make the trip herself—in order to lay to rest more than one ghost. Extremely moving, very fine and real: Myerson’s narration is so masterful and unobtrusive that the outlandishness of her story is overlooked.
Pub Date: May 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-88001-649-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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