Ryan highlights the quirks of ordinary life in a place known for the extraordinary in this sharp and funny collection.
In the shadow of the space program, everyday residents of Cape Canaveral and its environs cope with varying levels of domestic strife in these nine stories, set over the past 50 years.
Ryan (Gemini Bites, 2011, etc.) has a knack for squeezing drama out of seemingly mundane situations. In the title story, a nerdy gay teenager develops a crush on a self-aggrandizing ex-astronaut but gets more than he bargained for when the man and his wife invite him to dinner. A pregnant high schooler dreams of becoming a pageant queen in “Miss America” only to find herself in the home of a talent scout whose actions don’t exactly inspire confidence. For the most part, these stories, while all rooted in the everyday, work best when Ryan amps up the volume a decibel or two. The weaker links—one about a foster teen meeting a new sibling, another a somewhat too-familiar take on childhood bullying—lack the (slightly) out-of-the-ordinary circumstances that give the others their charges. As the book progresses, the protagonists get older, too, and though all of Ryan’s characters are endearing, they do get better—and saltier—with age. In the funny and affecting “Fountain of Youth,” a former “bookkeeper for an extortion racket” finds himself in witness protection at “the finest retirement community in all of Brevard County.” Set in the wake of the Challenger explosion, “Go Fever” is about a NASA engineer’s affair with the wife of his boss, who is obsessed with the idea that she’s trying to poison him. And in Ryan’s strongest piece, “Earth, Mostly,” a thrice-divorced grandmother attempts an afternoon tryst with her (married) defensive driving instructor.
Ryan highlights the quirks of ordinary life in a place known for the extraordinary in this sharp and funny collection.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-34138-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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