Downing sets the town-and-gown scenery well, but there’s an irony in a hero advocating for active writing in such a static...
A creative writing professor soldiers through a semester, uncertain of his own capacity to write or teach.
This sequel to Downing’s 1997 novel, Perfect Agreement, revisits Mark, a teacher at a Massachusetts college who guides a clutch of undergrads through the essentials of point of view, style, and metaphor. But he lacks much in the way of authority or even assertiveness. He cedes much of the control of the writing workshop to an unnamed professor with whom he co-teaches it, feels listless at home (his partner is working overseas), and is growing weary of both academic bureaucracy (he’s procrastinating on writing an assigned memo for a committee he serves on) and intramural tensions (the adjuncts are organizing). All of this lassitude gives the novel a distinct lack of body heat, especially in the early chapters, where much of the narrative excitement comes from the peculiarities of Mark's writing exercises: Write a scene using only one-syllable words, write about a car crash that kills a person, etc. Eventually the book snaps into the seriocomic groove that the campus novel typically demands, from Mark’s struggle to complete his own assignments to his hailing an Uber that turns out to be driven by one of the college’s ill-paid adjuncts. Some late-breaking plot twists, involving an ailing student and the professor’s true identity, shed some light on Mark’s disconnection from himself. But the prevailing mood is ambivalence: “You could call this fear of success or fear of failure. You could say that Mark was embarrassed by his ambitions or unequal to them.” That kind of wheel-spinning drains the action from the story. And as any writing teacher will tell you, the success of a story rests on the action that its central character brings to it.
Downing sets the town-and-gown scenery well, but there’s an irony in a hero advocating for active writing in such a static environment.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-147-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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