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YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER

Name: YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER
Author: Margaret Leroy
ISBN: 978-0-374-12601-8

by Margaret Leroy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2009

Leroy’s delicate psychological insight falls to pieces under the weight of solving a preposterous murder mystery.

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Leroy (The River House, 2005, etc.), who specializes in delineating the lives of unhappy, not entirely likable British women, describes a young single mother whose child-rearing problems defy mere psychology.

Thanks to an affair with a married man several years earlier, narrator Grace is now raising preschooler Sylvie on her own. A beautiful child, Sylvie has a number of quirks. She has always called Grace by her first name. She is intensely afraid of water. Lately she has been upsetting her best friend Lennie by saying the little girl isn’t the real Lennie. She sleeps with a photograph of an Irish coastal town she claims is her real home. Her obstinacy and fears increase, causing uncontrollable tantrums and moments of rage. Soon her preschool expels Sylvie. Lennie’s mother Karen, Grace’s only friend, suggests that Sylvie needs a therapist. Instead Grace seeks out Adam Winters, an academic researcher of the paranormal. Until Adam’s arrival, the novel is an ambitiously queasy character study of Grace: protective of her child but also defensive, still obsessed with her ex-lover and envious of Karen’s more comfortable, settled life. Adam introduces parapsychology as an improved alternative to bland mainstream solutions. Grace’s early distrust of Adam quickly gives way, in part because she finds him attractive but also because she is moved when he describes his older brother’s death while they were stealing a car together as teens and his brother’s ghostly return. The possibility that telling such a story to a client may be inappropriate does not enter into this novel’s Gothic worldview any more than the questionable ethics of Adam and Grace’s growing romantic involvement. Grace, Sylvie and Adam head to the Irish village depicted in Sylvie’s photo and ferret out her former life. Seven years ago, nine-year-old Jessica (now Sylvie) and her mother were murdered. The murderer is still at large, though not for long.

Leroy’s delicate psychological insight falls to pieces under the weight of solving a preposterous murder mystery.

Pub Date: April 21, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-374-12601-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOLDIER'S WIFE
by Margaret Leroy

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RIVER HOUSE
by Margaret Leroy

- BOOK REVIEW
POSTCARDS FROM BERLIN
by Margaret Leroy

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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.