by Karen McKinnon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
The bare bones here could have become nothing more than a twentysomething melodrama, but McKinnon brings to it the...
A self-consciously literary but perceptive and well-paced first outing about the relationships among a handful of self-absorbed East Village hipsters.
Dreaming of the day her work will be at MoMA, Becky, an ambitious and talented collagist, prepares for her first solo show in her apartment off Avenue A. On hand are Hugh, an old flame visiting from San Francisco; Dahlia, a sometime dancer and full-time rich kid, currently Becky’s best friend; and, Max, a vain and seductive actor, invited by Dahlia despite Becky’s protests. Dahlia has decided that Becky’s opening is an opportunity to demonstrate to one other person, the wildly dramatic femme fatale Callie, that the four of them—each at one time involved with, in love with, betrayed by, and/or obsessed with Callie—have moved on and are better off without her. Leading up to the opening, McKinnon recalls the group’s past, then proceeds in present time as Callie pursues Becky’s friendship and exploits her weaknesses; Callie cheats on Hugh with Max; Callie seduces Dahlia, then rejects her, then tells Becky it was her she wanted all along. Initially intrusive, McKinnon’s arty prose style—no quotes for dialogue, no paragraph breaks between speakers, adjectival constructs like “speechimpedimented”—is ultimately well suited to the exploration of self-deception and self-justification. In the climactic scene, Callie, finally onstage, discovers that Becky has turned the most vulnerable moment of her past into art. In a whiplash-fast reinterpretation, we see that emotionally manipulative Callie (her combined suicide attempt/art vandalism is masterful) has been outmaneuvered by the heretofore apparently put-upon Becky, revealed now as a (to the author’s credit, still-sympathetic) monster of ambition.
The bare bones here could have become nothing more than a twentysomething melodrama, but McKinnon brings to it the breathtaking, self-important, urgency of youth, along with insight into the mind of the hungry artist. A gripping, revealing, entertaining debut.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29058-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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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