A small masterpiece from an old master whose oeuvre bulks large in our literature and will last.
Auchincloss’s umpteenth (The Headmaster’s Dilemma, 2007, etc.) tells the story of a prestigious Manhattan law firm and the families in its orbit.
Yet another variation on the story he’s been telling for decades, it’s also a moving depiction of an often tested, never abandoned lifelong friendship. Adrian Suydam, scion of a fine old New York family, presents, embellishes and reflects on his published history of the firm of Saunders & Suydam, woolgathering about the life of his partner-mentor Ernest Saunders, a flinty conservative who in old age “achieved a national reputation as the stalwart champion of the old ways.” The more liberal Adrian has always deferred to Ernest’s brilliance and resolve. As he recalls their early years, during which Adrian fought with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders while Ernest steadfastly acquired professional experience and power, the novel gradually becomes a series of episodes: the brilliant, heartbreakingly brief life of Ernest’s perfect son Mark; the messy, demanding adult lives of both partners’ surviving children; the scandal-ridden and politically significant cases that made the firm’s reputation and sometimes put Saunders and Suydam at odds with each other. Further stories are told in extended “memorandums” written by several major and minor characters; handled woodenly and not credible as the narratives they purport to be, they are the novel’s major flaw. The final chapters are superb, notably the long-withheld story of Ernest’s dignified wife Bessie, whose stoical understanding that she has sacrificed passion for a life of reason and security shakes the compassionate Adrian to his core and may wring tears from the most jaded reader. Auchincloss is our Trollope: a productive, elegant artist whose keen understanding of the small worlds his characters inhabit permits him to examine their surprising variety with an energy undiminished even this late (he is in his 90s) in his brilliant career.
A small masterpiece from an old master whose oeuvre bulks large in our literature and will last.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-15275-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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