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ENTERTAINING DISASTERS

Name: ENTERTAINING DISASTERS
Author: Nancy Spiller
ISBN: 978-1-58243-451-3

by Nancy Spiller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2009

Earnest but undercooked.

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A food writer prepares to host a dinner party. Step one: Grouse. Step two: Clear the skeletons out of the closet.

The unnamed heroine of Spiller’s debut novel is a journalist who made her reputation by living a lie—she’s often written about the do’s and don’ts of hosting the perfect dinner party but is terrified of hosting one herself. So when she’s forced to entertain at her Los Angeles home to impress hotshot food-magazine editor Richard Cronenberg, she shifts into panic mode. In the early pages of the book, that means a lot of snarky commentary about the shallowness of Los Angeles, her estranged family and her nearly loveless marriage (she calls her husband “Somebody”), plus chapters that end with recipes whose directions add a dash of irony. What’s initially set up as farce—Murphy’s Law having its way with life—soon takes a severe tonal shift. The book integrates flashbacks to the heroine’s mother, Lenore, whose sad, isolated life as a single mom led to institutionalization, electroshock treatments and the contempt of her extended family. This back story helps explain why the narrator is so high-strung about the dinner party: “I know what happens to women who can’t do their job,” she says. But Spiller never convincingly connects the Type A writer and the dour girl whose schizophrenic mom buried a botched Thanksgiving turkey in the backyard, though the writer tries a few metaphorical feints to sell the idea. (Both suffer wounds in a bathtub, for instance.) Naturally, the dinner plans go off the rails—Cronenberg cancels, Somebody goes on a business trip—but the story remains strangely bifurcated and static, with the narrator’s present self smugly expounding about organic markets while her teenage self wrings her hands over her broken home. Her sister Hunter is something of a mediating influence, both in the narrator’s life and in the novel’s structure, but her role is heavily telegraphed—she’s arriving with a mysterious present that’s regularly referred to but not unpacked until the final pages.

Earnest but undercooked.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-58243-451-3

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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.