A quick-paced, sharp, cleverly designed book by a talented writer.
From veteran Knight (Eveningland, 2017, etc.), a deft, charming Southern coming-of-age novel—one that pays both attention and tribute to the legacy of the million-pound behemoth in that genre, To Kill a Mockingbird.
It's early spring 1994. Lenore Littlefield, a junior at the Briarwood School for Girls, is trying hard to concentrate on the end of basketball season and on the usual dorm rivalries and roommate strife rather than on the secret that she's shared, and plans to share, with no one: She's pregnant. Meanwhile, as punishment for a minor curfew violation, she's sentenced to help fill out the sparse ranks of the drama club, which, after years of resistance, will be staging the Pulitzer-winning play by Briarwood's most renowned alumna, now a Harper Lee–like rural recluse who's ceased to write. When the fill-in director, Lenore's hoops coach, Patricia Fink, moves Lenore into the lead role of a bright, troubled boarding school girl who's visited by the Phantom of Thornton Hall, strange things start happening and unexpected possibilities arise. Meanwhile, the Disney company—seeing in Civil War–battlefield-rich Virginia a fertile ground for attracting tourists—has acquired a massive nearby tract and is planning to develop it into a theme park called America (one harrowing example Knight gives of what this might look like is a ride designed to give rich kids and their parents a sense of what the Middle Passage felt like). Lenore's uncomfortable confidant, Bishop, the history teacher to whom she one day blurts her secret, thinks that if only he can get the playwright to emerge from exile for opening night, he can get the old firebrand to say something that will bring publicity and send the Mouse scurrying back to its corporate hole.
A quick-paced, sharp, cleverly designed book by a talented writer.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2842-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
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