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THE BOYS IN THE TREES

Name: THE BOYS IN THE TREES
Author: Mary Swan
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8670-6

by Mary Swan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

A haunting story with great emotional potential buckles under sluggish plotting and poor stylistic choices.

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In Swan’s awkward transition from short stories (The Deep: and Other Stories, 2003) to novels, a Canadian town tries to make sense of a man’s heinous crimes.

When Naomi marries William Heath in late-19th-century Liverpool, she knows little about him. She wants to escape the lonely house she shares with her father, and William promises stability and comfort, particularly when he is with their three children, Sadie, Tom and Willie. But tragedy strikes, and diphtheria takes all three, prompting husband and wife to cross the river toward the Canadian countryside. There, William takes a job as a bookkeeper and the couple has two more children, the mysteriously ill Lily and the precocious, scholarly Rachel. It becomes apparent that William had been deeply wounded as a child, and the scars drive him to do the unthinkable—after his boss charges him with embezzlement, William buys a gun and murders his family. The town reels in the wake of his crime. Rachel’s teacher, Miss Alice, obsesses about the final moment that William came to collect his daughter from school. Lily’s doctor is haunted, too, knowing that one day he could have cured the child. His son, meanwhile, a friend of Rachel’s, contemplates a gift she had bestowed on him. Even inanimate objects have a say—the family’s old house, a worn button and Rachel’s old drawings. William is finally hung for his crimes, but even as years pass the mark of grief remains. Swan captures a moment of bewilderment well, but though her adoption of multiple points of view gives a broader portrait of the town’s mourning, it also prevents the reader from creating a lasting relationship with any one narrator.

A haunting story with great emotional potential buckles under sluggish plotting and poor stylistic choices.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-8050-8670-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.