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TEMPTING FAITH DINAPOLI

Name: TEMPTING FAITH DINAPOLI
Author: Lisa Gabriele
ISBN: 0-7432-2522-8

by Lisa Gabriele ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Good-natured, witty, told with an agreeably light touch: a story that enchants with its own simplicity.

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A bright and genial debut about a girl’s awkward coming-of-age in 1980s Canada.

Faith DiNapoli’s mother always knew she would have four children, though she had thought they’d all be boys and she’d name them after the four evangelists. But Faith, her second child, upset those plans, and the DiNapoli brood turned out to be split down the middle by gender: Matthew, Faith, Hope, and Charlie. Faith’s father Joe emigrated from Italy as a young man but never really mastered English and kept the customs of the old country. Faith’s mother, Nancy, came from an Italian family, too, but (as she was always quick to point out) not one as “ethnic” as her husband’s. Joe DiNapoli was a construction worker whose work often took him away from home for long periods. Despite that, the DiPalma home was happy, and Faith had no bad memories of her early childhood. From about the age of seven, however, a cloud descends upon her world. On the day of her First Communion, her mother becomes violently sick in the car—which turns out to be more than a bad omen. Nancy disappears into the hospital for treatment of her mysterious “flu,” and once she comes home, she refuses to set foot in church again—or to speak to the parish priest, who seems eager indeed to have a word with her. Neighbors gossip, Faith’s father goes on about some “sin,” and eventually the entire family moves from Windsor to the little backwoods town of Emeryville, where life goes on more happily—until Faith discovers her mother’s journal and eventually learns the secret that her mother has long concealed. Told across a period of many years, Nancy’s confession becomes one more step in Faith’s entry into the adult world.

Good-natured, witty, told with an agreeably light touch: a story that enchants with its own simplicity.

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-7432-2522-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WINTERS
by Lisa Gabriele

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ALMOST ARCHER SISTERS
by Lisa Gabriele

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
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.