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THE LOST JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH

Name: THE LOST JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH
Author: Kimberly Knutsen
ISBN: 978-0-87580-725-6

by Kimberly Knutsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2015

An ambitious first novel that suffers from the same ennui as do its characters.

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An unhappy marriage implodes when demons from the couple's past and the surprise arrival of the wife’s pregnant sister upset the tenuous rhythms of family life.

In their 30s, Katie and Wilson have thousands of dollars of debt and seven degrees between them; they met in Kalamazoo in a Ph.D. program where they were enrolled because both “found it easier to start yet another program than to find a job.” Katie has no ambitions to apply her degree; after graduation, she's isolated inside a small condo with two children from her marriage to Wilson and a son from another relationship. Bored and passing time until her husband finishes his dissertation, "The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath," she has an affair with her neighbor Steven, a wealthy, much-younger community college student with a jealous fiancee. Katie believes her true self was lost as a child when she was repeatedly raped by a man at the edges of her father’s social circle. Scenes of Katie with her monstrous abuser are compelling but heighten the novel’s unevenness. A wickedly funny neurotic and sober alcoholic, Wilson writes the first three words of his dissertation—but despite showing up at his desk every day, nothing more. He falls into new forms of addiction, abandoning school so he can sell cars to feed a heroin habit. The novel’s nearly 400 pages are slow to launch. Katie’s sister, January, doesn't appear until almost a quarter of the way into the saga; her sections have a fresher, more consistent tone. A free spirit who left home with her mother’s blessing at 15, Jan romanticizes the three years she spent as the adoring girlfriend of a self-involved musician who dumped her when he became a rock star. He’s still touring the country while she has lived alone for 20 years in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico in a house paid for by his fame. Although she hasn't been in touch with Katie or Wilson since skipping their wedding, January shows up unannounced in Michigan, determined to learn how to be a mother by installing herself in her sister's world.

An ambitious first novel that suffers from the same ennui as do its characters.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-87580-725-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Switchgrass Books

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.