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THE HANDSOME SAILOR

Duberstein (The Alibi Breakfast, 1995; Postcards from Pinsk, 1991, etc.) sets out to fictionalize the last half of Herman Melville’s life—but in spite of a poetic and historically flawless effort, the result remains often turgid. After Moby Dick in 1851, Melville’s reading public fell away, and for over three decades he effectively wrote little or nothing. Duberstein opens his own tale when the novel of the great white whale is being published—and the Melville family is living a life of bucolic work and pleasure in rural Berkshire, Massachusetts, where the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne also reside in the neighborhood. All is edenic, that is, except that Melville (“the man who lived with cannibals”) is sadly unimpassioned within his marriage—with the result that this robust farmer/sailor/writer has an affair with the life-loving Mrs. Sarah Morewood right about the time his own third child is being born. Break-up between the lovers is inevitable, and the end of the affair is the beginning of 30 years of emptiness for Melville, filled only by his own determined stoicism as a Manhattan family dweller, the machine-like regularity of his ways, and his unglamourous job as a customs inspector. With age, however, comes a shape to things, and 30 years after his love for the now dead Sarah, another woman with Sarah’s verve and love of life enters Melville’s life—with results that will be no less sorrowful, and a narrative longueur that will be no less trying for the reader. The novel bursts at the seams with period flavor—the Sixth Avenue el has velour seats, Staten Island fine oysters, East 76th Street is a rough and uncouth neighborhood—but the stubborn, stony, often wordy Melville himself remains inert, however passionate inwardly, as life grows more confined, children and lovers die (one son is a suicide), passion is unattainable, the literary life unachievable. A fictional biography from the 19th century that’s extraordinary in its details, yet uncompelling at its center.

Pub Date: May 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-57962-007-8

Page Count: 268

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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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