A series of too-quickly-resolved dilemmas make this story about familial repression more like a manual: how to grow emotionally without breaking a sweat. Dwyer (The Tracks of Angels, 1994) documents the troubles of the Flannigans, a fragmented southern California family, in the weeks surrounding the suicide of oldest son Luke. His sister, Kate, a sculptor, has her own problems: to marry or not to marry Alek Perez, solid citizen and history teacher at her daughter’s high school? To forgive or not to forgive sister Colleen, who stole Kate’s husband ten years ago? At the same time, Audrey, Kate’s perspicacious 13-year-old, is quietly trying to deal with her own repressed traumas. The point of view nimbly shifts from Luke to Audrey to Kate, with mixed results: the story finds its most appealingly dark figure in Luke, a high-functioning depressive who, despite adoring family members, sinks slowly toward suicide, apparently out of sheer passivity; he’s just never caught on to this whole business of living. Meanwhile, Kate, ostensibly the central character, never fully emerges as believable, though it is her ’self— that is the subject of the title’s —portrait—: a fabulously kitschy ceramic rendering of the artist’s head from which sprout no fewer than nine figurines, representing Flannigans in appropriately mythical attitudes. For all Dwyer’s delicate, even luminous prose, the tone here is perhaps best emblematized by the clumsy psychodrama of that earthenware head. Colleen’s wrenching betrayal of her sister, the formative event of Kate’s adult life, is resolved in a moment of forgiveness that passes almost unnoticed. When Kate wraps up her mental goodbye to her brother with a comforting Thanksgiving tableau (—Gingerbread, coffee, family . . . I know it’s not much, but it’s enough—), we get the feeling that whipped cream has been dolloped on poor Luke’s corpse a bit prematurely. For self-actualization fans, a richly detailed and gracefully written family romance.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14440-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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