Finely observed and ultimately redemptive, but the gloom and reticence are overwhelming in this old-fashioned, rather too...
Two women, bonded by blood but more importantly by their experiences of crushing loss and retreat from life, find each other before it’s too late.
Synthesizing sensitive and soapy, Gornick’s (Louisa Meets Bear, 2015, etc.) fourth novel—a chopped-up chronology of a scattered family line—features Prudence O’Connor, age 101 in the present time of this multiera saga, but only 4 on the day of the family tragedy that the novel slowly disinters. Events are set in motion when Grace, Prudence’s previously unknown great-niece, turns up on the older woman’s Manhattan doorstep, bearing mementos from the past and news about Prudence’s brother, Randall, who quit the family for California when he was 14, some nine decades earlier. Prudence and Randall’s Irish immigrant parents were servants in the lavish household of glass artist Louis C. Tiffany, and although both Prudence and Randall marry “up,” Prudence never loses a sense of her humbler origins. Death visits the book’s pages regularly—a parent’s early demise; an abortion; a suicide; a fall into a ravine; a shooting; an execution. “What is the purpose of life?” asks Prudence, whose marriage to stiff, upper-class Carlton denies her children and who is too much “a coward of the heart” to grab happiness when it is offered. Randall, meanwhile, had a son, Leopold, the father to Grace and her twin brother, Garcia—another branch of the family tree marked by disappointment and pain. The deftness of Gornick’s talent is visible in the hints and glimpses of the past that puncture the rather more rote accounts of the passing generations. The family secret, when finally revealed, is less a surprise than a confirmation of what has been suggested and tidily connects the foundational dots—class, cash, death, regret.
Finely observed and ultimately redemptive, but the gloom and reticence are overwhelming in this old-fashioned, rather too visibly predetermined family drama.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-23054-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.
After acing a job interview and accepting a marriage proposal, Dannie Kohan has had the perfect day. That is, until she awakens to find herself five years in the future with a completely different man.
Just one hour in that alternate reality shakes Dannie to her core. After all, highly ambitious Dannie and her boyfriend, David, have plotted out their lives in minute detail, and the sexy man in her dream—was it a dream?—is most certainly not in the script. Serle (The Dinner List, 2018) deftly spins these magical threads into Dannie’s perfectly structured life, leaving not only Dannie, but also the reader wondering whether Dannie time traveled or hallucinated. Her best friend, Bella, would delight in the story given that she thinks Dannie is much too straight-laced, and some spicy dreaming might push Dannie to find someone more passionate than David. Unfortunately, glamorous Bella is in Europe with her latest lover. Ever pragmatic, Dannie consults her therapist, who almost concurs that it was likely a dream, and throws herself into her work. Pleased to have landed the job at a prestigious law firm, Dannie easily loses her worries in litigation. Soon four and a half years have passed with no wedding date set, and Bella is back in the U.S. with a new man in her life. A man who turns out to be literally the man of Dannie’s dream. The sheer fact of Aaron Gregory’s existence forces Dannie to reevaluate her trust in the laws of physics as well as her decision to marry David, a decision that seems less believable with each passing day. And as the architecture of Dannie’s overplanned life disintegrates, Serle twists and twines the remnants of her dream into a surprising future.
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3744-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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