Five-sixths of a darkly terrific delight.
In these confessions of a super creep, high hilarity alternates with the sad lowdown on a grown-up boy who makes believe he’s macho.
Matt Duffy’s a mess: “My best friend from high school blew his brains out at the end of our junior year,” he begins, and then dryly adds: “A year ago, Jack, my fifteen-year-old son, attempted suicide.” Wife Diane naturally suggests a shrink, and so Lisa Moscovitz gets Matt, too truculent for talk therapy, to journal his thoughts to try to discover, then tame, whatever sorrow-sowing monster lurks within. His inner jerk is pretty bad. As a kid he tortures Bobby—he of the “boney body and Gumby-walk”—then moves on to ridicule “Hockey Rocky,” another hapless neighbor he overhears working out, grunting to the soundtrack of the Stallone series (he coaxes his pals to taunt: “Adrian! Adrian!”). That Rocky kicks his ass hardly stops him. In high school, Fran, with her “black hair with shaved sides like Annabella Lwin, the super-hot singer from Bow Wow Wow,” almost humanizes Matt because she’s smarter and tougher than he, but, he’s afraid of love. Instead, he merely knocks boots with a sharp, petite sweetheart, “the Aptly Named Jeannie Small”—he nicknames her “Aptly”—and dumps her. After belittling a token black “friend” and losing touch with another, the pot-smoking “Barry Big Hair,” Matt ultimately moves on to fatherhood, at which he’s by turns permissively, neglectfully and meanly incapable. As his work with Moscovitz progresses, so does his introspection. For one thing, he becomes painfully hip to the sins of his pop, an Archie Bunker who dismisses all males with functioning hearts as “sister-men.” By the end, after a series of slight and unconvincing breakthroughs, he has become almost human—not quite Jimmy Stewart, but sorta. By turning its back on its own bad-ass yucks, Adelberg’s debut concludes with a jarring sanctimony.
Five-sixths of a darkly terrific delight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57962-228-2
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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