A portfolio of random sketches—however vivid—does not a novel make.
After an impromptu marriage, Florida teen embarks on a road trip, encountering the usual exponents of absurd Americana, in visual artist Helnwein’s debut novel.
What, exactly, are the potential hazards of Hester Day? Her family isn’t dysfunctional; it’s just that she doesn’t like her mother, father and older sister very much, and she’s similarly blasé about her steamy Gulf Coast hometown. After high-school graduation, she’s offended by her mother’s insistence she attend college, and as an evasive tactic she hangs out at the public library, where she encounters, amid the musty stacks, someone she knows only as Philosophy Man, age 21. The two find each other mutually, vaguely repulsive. But when Hester impulsively decides to adopt and is told she must be 18 and married, she finagles Philosophy Man, aka Fenton, into marrying her when she is of legal age. (The marriage fits into his plans to write an epic poem about a mentally challenged wife.) The two eschew physical contact and Hester stays home, until the full existential horror of her family drives her back into “Arlene,” Fenton’s camper, with her ten-year-old chubby, spaceship-obsessed cousin Jethro in tow. En route to Chicago, the three pick up a clairvoyant Jesus Freak hitchhiker who misdirects them to Kansas, where a kindly farm lady reminiscent of Auntie Em plies them with comfort food. A TV newscast, blaring during dinner, announces that Hester is wanted for kidnapping. Fenton and Arlene, who have a way of ducking out at the most inopportune moments, leave Hester and Jethro to the mercy of a stereotypical potbellied Midwestern deputy sheriff. Inevitably, Hester ends up back home, where the story devolves into wan musings about how one can only tolerate one’s family by escaping it, preferably with a virtual stranger. Sardonic Hester can’t sustain reader interest for this entire journey—the roadside attractions simply aren’t there.
A portfolio of random sketches—however vivid—does not a novel make.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7466-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
