by Justin Cartwright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2015
Evoking Coetzee’s Disgrace and Gordimer’s The House Gun, Cartwright brings new twists and a sure touch to his tragicomedy...
South-African born novelist Cartwright (Lion Heart, 2014, etc.) casts a sardonic eye on a London expat who’s trying to uncover, if not openly parade, his Afrikaner heritage.
For most of his adult life, Frank McAllister, Oxford-educated child of a liberal South African journalist, has succeeded wonderfully in keeping apartheid’s history at bay by adopting an English identity. A canny investor, he’s acquired an art collection and horses and a few good friends who are gamely paddling against the “onrushing middle years.” His one foothold in South Africa is a beach house nestled on the Cape Town coast where he can escape dreary London winters and his ex-wife’s bizarre demands. He’s relishing the chance to share this paradise with his new love, Nellie—a Scandinavian domestic goddess—and her mildly miscreant teenage son. Warming to the role of Kaapstad Prospero, Frank has planned nifty diversions for his guests. All the while, he strives to minimize their exposure to his not-distant-enough Afrikaner cousin, Jaco Retief. A once-promising snorkeler with extortionist tendencies, Jaco’s status dive in the “new” South Africa pricks at Frank’s conscience. Jaco’s presumption that “oom” (uncle) Frank and he are holdouts “up against” the current regime baffles and unnerves him. (At several points in the story, Jaco’s unfiltered rants whiz by—fast, highly comedic, loaded to kill like a psychopathic scuba fisherman’s spear gun—giving some urgency to Frank’s quandary over how to banish this badass kinsman for good.) Frank also wants to get on a fresh footing with his 21-year-old daughter, Lucinda, just out of rehab, who arrives on scene with a small black child whose parents’ whereabouts she promises to explain. Frank hopes she’ll open up on their planned trek to a few historical sites tied to his pioneering Boer ancestor Piet Retief. Retief’s infamous murder by a Zulu chief (re-created for Veldt tourists by live actors) doesn’t entirely match up with contemporary accounts, and Frank feels compelled to sort it all out. Shockingly, his born-again curiosity and engagement with a country and people he’s stood back from for so long expose him to a new “custom” he doesn’t see coming.
Evoking Coetzee’s Disgrace and Gordimer’s The House Gun, Cartwright brings new twists and a sure touch to his tragicomedy about a decent man’s rude awakening to shared history's capricious side. Caveat emptor, Ancestry.com.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-018-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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