SUDDEN RAIN

Name: SUDDEN RAIN
Author: Maritta Wolff
ISBN: 0-7432-5482-1

by Maritta Wolff ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2005

A virtuoso drama of suburban angst to put alongside Peyton Place, Couples and The Ice Storm, fueled by dialogue worthy of...

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This posthumous novel of quiet desperation in the Los Angeles suburbs from much-honored Wolff (1918–2002), which might have come out of a time capsule, reportedly did come from the author’s refrigerator, where she stored it for 30 years rather than making the revisions her publisher requested.

The time is 1972. Wolff’s housewives talk of the Draft, of McLuhan, Mastroianni and Erich Segal, and of the declining fortunes of the aerospace industry, where three of their husbands work. Tom Fallon is a veteran designer plotting to sell his company and divorce his wife as soon as he can announce a fat NASA contract. His competitor, Jim Holman, is about to pull off an engineering coup he thinks will win him both the contract and the leadership of his corporation. Dave Friedman is off somewhere toiling for the military-industrial complex as well while the real action unfolds behind their backs. Beginning with flower child Killian Fallon’s divorce suit against Tom and Nedith’s son Pete, Wolff (Whistle Stop, 1941, etc.) takes a vivisectionist’s delight in laying bare every secret of these suburban families. Since the secrets are overwhelmingly domestic, Wolff focuses on the unhappy lives of Cynny Holman, Nancy Friedman, Nedith Fallon and Killian, the daughter-in-law she loathes. Occasional dramatic incidents are supplied by men who offer sexual temptation and invitations to talk and by the outrageously metaphorical weekend weather: a sudden rainstorm, the Santa Ana winds, a forest fire that rages out of control. But the main device for advancing the plot and revealing the characters is a series of tour-de-force arguments whose principals flash, sparkle, despair and forgive in their touchingly herky-jerky attempts to come to terms with their diminished expectations of life in general and their marriages in particular.

A virtuoso drama of suburban angst to put alongside Peyton Place, Couples and The Ice Storm, fueled by dialogue worthy of Flannery O’Connor.

Pub Date: April 5, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-5482-1

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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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.