Intelligent and profound but quite depressing.
An introverted older man deals with the grief of losing his wife.
Dion's melancholy, meditative debut dwells in the head of Gene Ashe, a widower after 49 years of marriage. It opens with a scene at the beach that conveys both Gene's crankiness and his melancholy: "The beach was crowded, a cluttered heap of pink skin, chipped toenail polish, ice chests, crumpled tin foil..."; a group of teenage girls beside him emits "a collective shriek that he vaguely recognized as a form of laughter"; "His interest in other people lay primarily in the mystery of their happiness." Through this lens of gloom, we gradually collect the details of his life. He has one adult child, a daughter, who is perennially irritated with him, and a close friendship with a couple he and his wife have known since their college days, though he is just as habitually annoyed by the husband as his daughter is with him. Adding to his woes at the beginning of the novel is the need to write a eulogy for his wife; even with the help of a how-to site on the internet, he is unable to get past four words: "Something definite was lost." When the memorial service does occur, he is hurt and bewildered by the speeches given by his daughter and by his wife's best friend. At this point, since Gene's health is failing, his daughter hires him a caretaker who at first seems to offer not just housekeeping, but relief from loneliness. As the weeks and months go by, Gene sorts through his memories, some of them perplexing and seeming to suggest that his wife had secrets from him. At this novel's most successful moments, the depiction of Gene's mental state achieves the eloquence and insight of C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed: "It amazed him he could still remember so much about the particular way she had inhabited the world. Such intimacy, to think of these things, to know exactly the way she had cared for her own body or moved it through space."
Intelligent and profound but quite depressing.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-47387-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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