An unusual story of both familial and romantic love, the strange dreams humans have, and the cost and benefits of loyalty.
Trudy sews pillowcases at a linen factory and helps her mother, Claire, care for her 4-year-old niece, Mercy.
Claire pines for both Trudy’s father, who left when Trudy and her sister were small, and Trudy’s sister, Tammy, who repeated the family pattern and left her own small child with Claire and Trudy. It’s the 1970s in Preston Mills, a town that had to be moved to make room for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Trudy’s life consists of caring for her permanently sad mother and her niece and avoiding the bullies at work. Then she meets Jules, a stuntman who has come to town to drive a “rocket car” up a ramp, a half mile across the river, and onto an island. Trudy's boring, lonely life is jolted both by her new love and Tammy's reappearance. Claire, too, finds her miserable existence upended by hope. In addition to this tangle of relationships, another of the book’s complicating factors is that it is divided into parts, chapters, and sections. Marston (The Love Monster, 2012) gives the sections flip titles, like “Because you just keep making things up until they seem true” and “Because sometimes you feel like a sheet on a clothesline," which read a bit like blog-post titles. The characters speak to each other in ways that seem more contemporary than '70s-like, as well, and Trudy is a distant main character. However, this is certainly unlike other hard-luck love stories, and despite some improbabilities (such as Tammy’s boyfriend, Fenton, having a seizure in front of the family and no one getting him medical care) and the bleakness that is woven through the characters’ lives, it's an entertaining novel. Jules’ dream is certainly uncommon, and it’s hard not to root for decent, loyal Claire and tragically clueless Fenton. And Mercy, who is still young enough to have a positive view of her fellow humans, even those related to her.
An unusual story of both familial and romantic love, the strange dreams humans have, and the cost and benefits of loyalty.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77041-461-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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