Utterly bizarre and completely bewitching, this twisted, delicious tale will grab you from the first page and hurl you over...
In this thrilling debut novel, a young woman with big but unfocused ambitions moves to Los Angeles to become the personal assistant to her childhood best friend, a rising Hollywood starlet.
Brilliant Abby never really made it out of her childhood bedroom in Michigan. Her vivid dream life and teenage obsession with the surrealist filmmaker Auguste Perren have pinned her in one place while she grows ever more detached and depressed. "The walls around my dream life leaked," Abby admits, early in the novel. "My night visions were three-dimensional, lavishly detailed scenes, feature-length films." But when Elise Van Dijk, Abby's childhood best friend and a now-famous actress, returns home for their 10-year high school reunion, her near-erotic dreams of reconnection take on the contours of reality. Weeks after the reunion, Abby hops a plane to LA and shows up out of the blue at Elise's gated front door, where she resumes her role as best friend, confidante, and support system. "I was simply there to listen, to groan in sympathy and glow with pride....I loved the sound of your voice. Whatever its petty grievances or vacuous prattle, I would have been happy to hear it forever." Acampora (The Wonder Garden, 2015) writes propulsive sentences at a fever pitch, guiding the reader through Abby's dream world as she hunts for corresponding clues in a reality of her own making. Told in the second person, the novel is by turns a confession, an accusation, and a stalker's diary, yet it is also grounded by Acampora's musings on philosophy, art, and ambition. While there are more novels than ever dedicated to obsessive female friendship, Acampora takes a relationship story that could have been reduced to petty jealousy and turns it into something bigger and weirder, as if David Lynch had astral projected into the work of Melissa Broder. This is the Los Angeles of weird cults and day-drunk stars, of struggling documentary filmmakers and mysterious but powerful directors. By turns demented, sad, and frightening, Abby is a unique heroine making all the wrong choices feel somehow right and just.
Utterly bizarre and completely bewitching, this twisted, delicious tale will grab you from the first page and hurl you over the edge.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2941-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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