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THE MAINTENANCE OF HEADWAY

Name: THE MAINTENANCE OF HEADWAY
Author: Magnus Mills
ISBN: 978-1-63286-036-1

by Magnus Mills ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2015

Nearly flawless in its own unassuming way.

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Set within the bureaucracy of the London bus system, Mills’ slim novel fuses whimsy with warped logic.

Bus drivers must remain committed to the Maintenance of Headway—“The notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to”—even when it seems absurd. Consider a moment when the narrator’s bus is running early. What does he do? He disregards his current passengers and fakes engine problems. Another bus driver even stops to help him, and together, they stage an animated discussion and walk around the engine thoughtfully until a proper amount of time has passed. No real plot here—rather, a series of vignettes that demonstrate the kind of bureaucratic logic that’s warped because it’s so airtight yet so small-minded. Mills—who's been a bus driver himself—has written a fantastically odd novel, full of great details (a TV at the bus station that's been stuck on the same channel for four years) and walk-on characters (like Mrs. Barker, who creates chaos by stopping anywhere—including green traffic lights—to pick up passengers). Mills (Explorers of the New Century, 2005, etc.) avoids revealing anything personal about his characters: even his narrator lacks a life outside the all-consuming absurdity of his work. In a long novel, this might get tiresome, but Mills has written a slender book and made each sentence feel harried, peculiar. There’s bizarre logic: “The idea of curtailing bus journeys in order to provide a better bus service defied logic, but needless to say, the Board of Transport had a logic all of its own.” There’s bureaucratic pseudo-science: beyond the titular reference, there’s also the Theory of Early Running and the Law of Cumulative Lateness. It’s a comic complaint—whimsical, but pointed.

Nearly flawless in its own unassuming way.

Pub Date: May 19, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63286-036-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
EXPLORERS OF THE NEW CENTURY
by Magnus Mills

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THE SCHEME FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT
by Magnus Mills

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THREE TO SEE THE KING
by Magnus Mills

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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.