A tour de force that makes readers face hard truths about the effect a person’s choices can have on her soul.
McLaughlin invites readers on a journey of the heart in this celebration of life, death and what it means to be human.
After fighting cancer for a year, teenage Amy finally starts to feel better. Then she dies in a tragic accident. Her mother Jane feels so much guilt that she lets her daughter’s death tear her life apart. One year after Amy’s death, Jane’s husband has left her and her son spends a lot of time with his dad, leaving Jane alone for days at a time. She passes these days with human-rights photographer Riva Hakim, whom is dying. Riva is also the wife of the late professor who was Amy’s biological father. While Jane has begun to deal with the guilt she feels over Amy’s death, she still has a long way to go when we first meet her. Riva, for her part, is trying to die well, and that includes forgiving the man who cheated on her as a course of habit, and opening up to a friendship with Jane as well as putting down her camera to write her memoirs. As she writes, Riva remembers the places she’s seen in the world—the trauma, tragedy and joy—and fights to see how these things have changed her. Her faith in God brings her peace during this difficult time, and she tries to lead Jane to that peace as well. As the two women journey, together and separate, they learn how to make peace with their pasts and how to go on into the future, whatever it asks of them. They learn that a dream can be a downfall, that endings are also beginnings and that what God has in store for a life may not be what the liver of that life always thought they wanted. McLaughlin’s storytelling is superb, deftly handling both women’s stories and the transitions between them, allowing readers to easily follow along. She also expertly handles emotions, making Jane and Riva’s grief, loss, anger and joy palpable.
A tour de force that makes readers face hard truths about the effect a person’s choices can have on her soul.Pub Date: June 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456354626
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
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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