by Louis Begley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2013
Less interesting as a novel than as insight into the mind of a novelist.
Autumn turns to winter in this novel about an author of the novelist’s own generation, who reflects upon (among other things) the complex relationships between fiction and life, memory and truth.
The latest from the venerable Begley (Schmidt Steps Back, 2012, etc.) lacks the scope and dark humor of his multivolume “Schmidtie” saga, but it is nonetheless as sharply observed and subtly nuanced as most of his writing in its focus on class distinctions and destiny among the Eastern elite. It could pass as a novel from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s later decades, if Fitzgerald had lived so long. Its protagonist is Philip, an author of previously greater note, a widower who dearly misses his late wife, who was also a writer. Attending a ballet, he runs into an heiress whose reputation was compromised by her wild, erratic streak and whose ex-husband had died in an accident after a divorce that still left her bitter. Her name is Lucy, and Philip had once slept with her, which seems like a minor plot detail, because everyone had. The bulk of the narrative finds Lucy telling her version of her troubled courtship with and marriage to Thomas Snow, who was then her social inferior but later eclipsed her as a renowned businessman and economist. Both their son and the younger, prettier woman Thomas married after divorcing Lucy provide far different perspectives on the relationship, and those conflicting memories obsess Philip, who wants to fill in the blanks, untwist the contradictions and likely even write a novel with this marriage as raw material. (Perhaps even this very novel that Begley has written?) “But the book would be a novel,” he assures Lucy, “not a memoir or reportage...a mosaic, made of slivers of glass or stone, some picked up as I went along and some I had fabricated.” Since most of this novel is narrated through paraphrase—the protagonist’s spin on what he heard the other characters say—the reader must decide how much he can trust the narrator, a man in despair over “the utter futility of my existence, the books I was writing included.”
Less interesting as a novel than as insight into the mind of a novelist.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53746-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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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