Ambitious in premise, formulaic in execution.
A feisty abolitionist journeys to pre-Civil War Kansas in search of her lover and defies a band of pro-slavery marauders led by a psychopath.
Mackey (The Notorious Mrs. Winston, 2007, etc.) doesn’t give her heroine the genteel upbringing typical of a young lady circa 1853. Raised in Brazil by her explorer/ entrepreneur/botanist father, Carrie Vinton befriends escaped African slaves and is a crack shot. Her beloved since childhood days in Kentucky is physician William Saylor, who runs a blockade in Rio during a smallpox epidemic to treat Carrie’s dying father. Then the lovers are stricken, and Carrie wakes up in a convent hospital to find that no one can tell her of William’s fate. Her late father has left her an immense fortune, and William has left her pregnant. She succumbs to the blandishments of Deacon Presgrove, a smooth-talking former actor who arrives in Rio to inform her that his stepbrother William did indeed perish in the epidemic. Newly wed to Deacon, the son of rabid pro-slavery senator Bennet Presgrove, Carrie gives birth aboard a Washington-bound ship, but her premature baby dies. In the capital, Deacon promptly reveals his true colors: not only does he endorse slavery, he himself owns a slave, a young prostitute in a nearby bordello. Deacon has also usurped Carrie’s fortune and perpetrated a fake obituary of her that led William (that’s right, he’s alive too) to head for Kansas, a territory now embroiled in violent clashes over whether it will become a slave or free state. Carrie follows, and from here the plot hews faithfully to historical incident, detailing battles between slavers and abolitionists. (John Brown and his sons are among the latter, dispatching slaveholders with broadswords.) Despite the author’s efforts to enliven things with Clark, a homicidal nutcase hired by Deacon, the Kansas section devolves into predictable adventure-romance, not helped by disconcertingly contemporary diction.
Ambitious in premise, formulaic in execution.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-425-22791-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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