Thai’s voice establishes all the depth of character there is here, the supporting cast existing mainly to prompt him toward...
Minus the hip-hop window-dressing and sprinklings of rap names, Jasper’s debut is only a desultory rendering of a young man’s journey to maturity.
Nineteen-year-old Thai Williams—the brightest among his friends—passes his days in school, on his job, and hanging with his friends in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Then one day he walks in on his girlfriend grinding it out with a stranger named Nick, whom he later catches up with at a party. While he’s chasing Nick, a gun ends up in Thai’s hands, goes off, and a bullet lodges in Nick’s skull. Believing himself a felon on the run, Thai lights out for Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lays low with Enrique (“E”). From the old neighborhood, E has made an enviable new start: he has a job with his mother in real estate, a sweet periwinkle Jeep, and a “rich girl” who respects herself. After some time with E, Thai ends up partying with white people—they’re unexpectedly friendly—befriending a troubled girl named Alicia, and making occasional love with neighboring flight attendant Robin. Alicia, recently through an abortion, is still tangled up with a mean boyfriend who unsurprisingly clobbers Thai a couple of times in warning. Robin, meanwhile, encourages Thai to be his own man. E’s mother, whose business is thriving, even offers him a job and the chance to enter college. What’s not to like? Yet Thai comes to understand that in his previous environment, his irresponsible friends in effect conditioned him to murder Nick. So he goes to church, gets right with God and his father, learns some truths about his past, and heads back home to clean things up in D.C. before going on to whatever next stage in his life may follow.
Thai’s voice establishes all the depth of character there is here, the supporting cast existing mainly to prompt him toward his next insight. Still, this 25-year-old author shows a talent that could blossom in another, more challenging, book.Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0707-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
