The Symmetry of Snowflakes

Name: The Symmetry of Snowflakes
Author: Paul Michael Peters
ISBN: 978-1505693690

by Paul Michael Peters ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny...

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In Peters’ (Peter in Flight, 2013) novel, a young man on the brink of making it big must sort out his complicated family and personal situations.

Hank Hanson has problems that many other people would like to have. At 29, he owns his own boutique greeting-card firm, which has received a multimillion-dollar buyout offer. He has a large extended family, due to his parents’ divorces and remarriages, and they all want to see him for the holidays—or as he terms it, his “annual trial—several long weeks that will test my character and prove my endurance.” Although he’s insecure, he’s still attractive enough for a beautiful woman, Erin Contee, to give him her number. However, it turns out that she has a past that affects other people in his circle. Then, his unreliable father has a financial crisis and a health scare that forces Hank to re-examine his own choices. The author paces his story well and offers some pithy images: when family friends observe the protagonist’s resemblance to his departed mother, he notes “an awkward stir of the emotional sediment that has gone untouched since our last meeting.” Hank, though, is a problematic character. On the one hand, he’s a nice-guy hero who takes care of the people around him; for example, when his siblings won’t help their father, Hank is willing to bail him out, which costs him much time, money, and effort. On the other hand, readers may find his self-pity hard to take, given his mostly enviable position in life. Many people are caught in Hank’s “sandwich generation” and supporting their parents—but with nothing like $17 million to allay expenses. Also, Hank’s tendency to blame women for his own actions reads as if he’s making excuses: “if Midge is this capable of manipulating people to get what she wants, how talented must other women be?” Women manipulate and men make mistakes, in Hank’s view—and it’s a view that calls his good-guy status into question.

A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny hero.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1505693690

Page Count: 257

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.