This is a novel that doesn't really try to make you believe in it, or in much of anything, including cause and effect.
A family tragedy inspires a professor to an act of heroism with strangers.
At the opening of the latest novel by the prolific, eclectic Everett (So Much Blue, 2017, etc.), first-person narrator Zach Wells doesn’t seem like someone who is likely to put himself on the line for others. He lives a very narrow life on automatic pilot, introducing himself as a man of “profound and yawning dullness.” He finds teaching to be rote; he considers his scientific research and publication to be all but pointless. His love for his daughter would appear to be the main thing holding his loveless marriage together. He initially deflects the pleas for support from a colleague making her tenure bid and the attentions of a student who seems to be flirting with him. “So often our stories begin at their ends,” he explains in the middle of establishing these plot details. “The truth was, I didn’t know which end was the beginning or whether the middle was in the true middle or nearer to that end or the other.” It's hard for the reader to find it interesting to be living inside Zach's head, since Zach doesn't find it very interesting. So, this is really a story about storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, the way we shape them, and the way they shape our lives. Having introduced the elements of his plot, Zach sees the tenure case resolve itself in a shocking manner, and the flirtatious student simply disappears from the narrative. All of this feels somewhat arbitrary. The focus seems to narrow on the family, and the daughter in particular, who apparently starts to suffer from a rare disease that causes partial blindness, seizures, dementia, and death. It is “unusually progressive,” terminal, and there is no cure. It is hell in a world without God. Yet, in a plot device that might be called a deus ex machina, Zach receives a series of handwritten pleas for help in the pockets of clothing that he buys on eBay. Against his usual impulses, he acts on those pleas: “So that I might…redeem myself?” He doesn’t believe in redemption or a redeemer. But he has to do something.
This is a novel that doesn't really try to make you believe in it, or in much of anything, including cause and effect.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64445-022-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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