Biting prose in need of a worthier target.
An introvert confronts the odd behavior of various family members to preserve his home and sense of self.
Sharpe’s previous novel, Jamestown (2007), was a broad, raucous tale that satirized the mythology surrounding America’s first settlers. This slim follow-up, by contrast, couldn’t be more interior and domestic, though his arch humor and out-of-left-field plot turns remain intact. The hero, Karl Floor, is a milquetoast high-school math teacher from Long Island who, we learn in the first chapter, is so socially inept that two of his students feel free to beat him up after class. At home he discovers Sylvia Vetch, an attractive young woman who’s arrived to rob the place. Despite her criminality, Karl is so drawn to her that he lets her take him to a party where he suffers the taunts of her alpha-male friends. Making his escape, he returns home to fight with his stepfather, Larchmont, culminating in Karl’s smashing his head with a pool cue. Larchmont absorbs his near-death experience with surprisingly good humor, after which Sylvia returns to announce that she’s actually Larchmont’s daughter and Karl’s half-sister, and—actually, plot summary only goes so far in characterizing Sharpe’s earnest but willfully absurd and deeply frustrating novel. Karl is a kind of existentialist archetype, batted around by all manner of social forces—race, class, family, romantic relationships—but his acting out with a pool cue makes him an unsympathetic hero in the face of those challenges. Because Sharpe is disinterested in penetrating Karl’s psyche (or anybody else’s) very deeply, the novel is mainly defined by how it jumps from ridiculous plot point to plot point—the various threads, involving blackmail, the ownership of the Floor family home and Karl’s capacity to love, all eventually resolve, but not particularly satisfyingly. In Jamestown, the arrogance and violence of colonialism was fair game for Sharpe’s attitude; affecting the same tone here means he’s cracking wise about broken homes and immature loners, which feels like small-game hunting. The abstracted plotting only further distances the reader.
Biting prose in need of a worthier target.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-187-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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