Griffin’s House is drenched in foggy, gaslit, garbage-strewn detail (not to mention several heavy echoes of A Tale of Two...
Images of Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Fielding’s Inns of Court arise from this densely atmospheric historical tale, the second from the young English-born author of The Requiem Shark (2000).
A potentially good novel lies within it, somewhere between two narratives of unequal interest and uncertain interrelationship. The first, and better, traces the dark doings of eminent London anatomist (and former surgeon) Sir Edmund Cathcart and his student and apprentice Joseph Bendix, fresh from a Parisian education in both medicine and l’amour. Griffin persuasively characterizes both men as credible mixtures of scientific integrity and intellectual arrogance and heightens interest in their researches (which, predictably, require clandestine purchases of fresh corpses) by adding to the mix the historical figures of novelist-pamphleteer (and ultimate London insider) Daniel Defoe and such notorious malefactors as brigand Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, who’s both master criminal and “Thief Taker” for hire (“Useful and perhaps the vilest man in London”). So far so good—until Griffin shifts the focus to Bendix’s fascination with his mentor’s closeted daughter Amelia, an albino beauty whose skin “blisters” in the sun and whose blindness motivates her father’s amoral pursuit of the medical knowledge that may enable him to restore her sight and give her normal health. A little past the midway point here, Joseph’s courtship of, and later (sexless) marriage to, the fragile Amelia takes center stage—and much of the story’s energy drains away, leaving it as bloodless as its passive (in fact, really rather tiresome) heroine. This despite a flurry of carefully staged surprise twists that clutter the novel’s repeatedly delayed climax (following some inexcusably overextended authorial foreplay).
Griffin’s House is drenched in foggy, gaslit, garbage-strewn detail (not to mention several heavy echoes of A Tale of Two Cities), but it fails to live up to the viscerally dramatic promise of its yeasty opening chapters. Disappointing.Pub Date: April 27, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50472-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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