Humorous, quick like the wind: fiction that peers at an imaginary life never head-on but through a multitude of sideways...
Having an extra leg doesn’t mean you can’t have a full life.
When author Dunn (the fictional one, not the real one who wrote Ella Minnow Pea, 2001) sent the only manuscript copy of his new novel to the editor at MacAdam/Cage, the editor promptly destroyed it (accidentally, in her bath), leaving no choice but to publish the end matter as a book in its own right. This rather daunting idea is made more palatable by the fact that Dunn is not only rather garrulous in his notes, but that his subject, the fictional life of three-legged Jonathan Blashette, is dramatic enough to be told easily in the margins. To nobody’s surprise, the Arkansas-born Blashette finds work early in life as a circus freak, with Thaddeus Grund and his Traveling Circus and Wild West Show. It’s a marginal existence, being stuck in a second-rate carnival, and three-legged Blashette is made for bigger things. After a stint in WWI, Blashette has a revolutionary idea: men’s underarm deodorant. His company, Dandy-de-odor-o, Inc., is bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, whom Blashette met in his circus days (a long story), just one of the many famous people Blashette would claim to have met in his life. There was the cab ride with the man who would become Rudolph Valentino, and drinks with the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, Woody Guthrie, and Betty Ford. Dunn’s tale is a sort of anti–E.L. Doctorow one: historical fiction of a sort, covering the 1880s through the 1960s, but refreshingly non-epic, reveling in odd comic details (like the unimpressive Bowery Hotel “Round Table” that Blashette belonged to, sad imitation of the Algonquin) and non sequiturs of the David Foster Wallace school.
Humorous, quick like the wind: fiction that peers at an imaginary life never head-on but through a multitude of sideways glances, peeking through fingers and intimating stranger things than can be imagined in the light of day.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-65-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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