Moving at times but not well executed.
Troubled by religious traumas, a young gay Black man struggles to reconcile his racial and sexual identities.
In the wake of 9/11, Jesse McCarthy is 19 and living in the British Midlands; his parents, who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, have dissuaded him from pursuing academic study, encouraging him instead to devote himself to the church. His mother, who's first-generation Jamaican British, is depressed and blames Jesse for her travails; his stepfather is White and has mostly given up on attempting to nurture him. As tensions rise at home, Jesse—an active and beloved member of his church community—is summoned to speak with the preacher: Not only has he been caught drunk and high on marijuana, but he's been accused of making a homoerotic remark to his close friend. Disfellowshipped from the church and thrown out of his house, Jesse moves to London with all the money he's saved up from working at McDonald’s. Independent of his family and faith, he's finally able to enjoy his sexual freedom. Eventually, after a brief and disastrous waiting gig, Jesse finds that he can support himself through sex work, though at an emotional cost. He yearns for the safety and comfort of a more permanent relationship. While compelling at times—especially when Jesse interrogates the nexus between his sexuality and Blackness—the novel sags with overwritten passages: long digressions into music, repetitive sex scenes, mundanities described in excessive detail. The pace drags, with key scenes lost in the midst of less significant ones. Structurally, the novel is confused and inconsistent. The events of the moving first section, about a Windrush generation Jamaican family immigrating to a brutally racist Britain in the early 1950s, don't figure into the novel until the final quarter, when narrative threads about Jesse’s past are hastily (and messily) tied up.
Moving at times but not well executed.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54706-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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 moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.
During an annual beach vacation, a mother confronts her past and learns to move forward.
Her family’s annual trip to Cape Cod is always the highlight of Rocky’s year—even more so now that her children are grown and she cherishes what little time she gets with them. Rocky is deep in the throes of menopause, picking fights with her loving husband and occasionally throwing off her clothes during a hot flash, much to the chagrin of her family. She’s also dealing with her parents, who are crammed into the same small summer house (with one toilet that only occasionally spews sewage everywhere) and who are aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Rocky’s life is full of change, from her body to her identity—she frequently flashes back to the vacations of years past, when her children were tiny. Although she’s grateful for the family she has, she mourns what she’s lost. Newman (author of the equally wonderful We All Want Impossible Things, 2022) imbues Rocky’s internal struggles with importance and gravity, all while showcasing her very funny observations about life and parenting. She examines motherhood with a raw honesty that few others manage—she remembers the hard parts, the depths of despair, panic, and anxiety that can happen with young children, and she also recounts the joy in a way that never feels saccharine. She has a gift for exploring the real, messy contradictions in human emotions. As Rocky puts it, “This may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063345164
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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