Likable, jaunty, lesser Vonnegut: the chatty autobiography of minor Abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian (a minor player in Breakfast of Champions)—interspersed with Rabo's present-day doings in his posh, art-treasure-filled manse in East Hampton, Long Island. Now 70-ish, a loner since the death of his super-rich, beloved second wife, Rabo hasn't painted for years. His potato-barn studio is locked, with his final, secret masterwork contained therein (á la Bluebeard); his house bursts with the Pollocks and Rothkos and such he acquired years ago for little or nothing; his own so-so oeuvre is nonexistent, having self-destructed—"thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvases and the acrylic wall-paint and colored tapes I had applied to them." So Rabo is writing his memoirs, despite frequent interruptions from his new, self-invited house. guest: nosy, pushy, voluptuous Circe Berman, 43, widow of a Baltimore brain-surgeon, and author (under the "Polly Madison" pseudonym) of super-popular YA novels. And there are also occasional visits from neighbor-chum Paul Slazinger, a penniless, artistic novelist whose fragile psyche is hard-hit by the presence of crafty, nonartistic best-selling "Polly Madison." The memoirs themselves also feature this hoary art/commerce dichotomy. As an artistically gifted boy in 1920's California, child of Armenian immigrants (traumatized by the Turkish atrocities), Rabo writes fan letters to famous, super-realistic NYC illustrator Dan Gregory (nÉ Gregorian)—and wins, long-distance, the heart of Gregory's abused mistress Marilee Kemp. This leads to an apprenticeship with creepy Gregory (a graphic "taxidermist"), a brief affair with Marilee ("three hours of ideal lovemaking"), and a lifelong preoccupation with technique vs. "soul" in painting. Later on there's WW II service as a camouflage specialist (Rabo loses an eye), an unnerving reunion with war. scarred Marilee in Italy, and bohemian days with the young Abstract Expressionists—focusing on a fictional, self-destroying genius named Terry Kitchen. The book's final revelation—the nature of the secret painting locked up in the potato-barn—finds Vonnegut returning, without much force, to his favorite antiwar themes. Elsewhere, too, the familiar messages—pacifist, humanist, feminist—are worked in rather clumsily. But the curmudgeonly interplay with unstoppable snoop Circe/Polly has a bright comic edge reminiscent, mildly, of Berger and Bellow; the sprightly memoirs have just a light, airy shading of fable and exaggeration. So, though less arresting or Vivid or disturbing than prime Vonnegut (and a disappointment for readers expecting real development of the Abstract Expressionist angle), this is an easy-to-take mixture of comic diversion, low-key satire, and unabashed preaching.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1987
ISBN: 038533351X
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
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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