Ten stories by a talented Australian: vividly imagined, cleanly written futurist fables that, despite faint echoes of Donald Barthelme and Ian McEwan, really are most akin to the work of such darkly progressive, sociologically-oriented science fiction writers as Harlan Ellison, Jack Dann, and Christopher Priest. Like them, Carey only occasionally focuses hard on a fantastical premise—a nightmare striptease that goes far beyond clothes ("Peeling"), a world in which unloved places and people dematerialize ("Do You Love Me?"); and these rather derivative notions are given nicely personalized, crisply matter-of-fact treatment. ("Exotic Pleasures," on the other hand—a fairy-tale-ish parable about a beautiful/ dangerous bird that is pure pleasure to stroke—belabors its obvious themes.) The real interest here comes instead with Carey's more overtly socio-political constructions, especially those that deal with revolutionary developments in eye-of-the-be-holder perceptions: in the slightly overextended "The Chance," a man struggles to prevent his beautiful lover from seeking an ugly, proletarian body in the genetic lottery; in the title story, a seedy house-ful of "Fat Men Against the Revolution" (fat is now, unfairly, synonymous with reactionary) becomes a microcosm of dog-eat-dog politics; in "The Puzzling Nature of Blue," a businessman-poet who has been responsible for unleashing a defective drug on a colonial island society (it turns the hands blue) winds up on the island himself. . . with fatally un-blue hands. And two of the best stories depend hardly at all on fantasy: "American Dreams"—in which a terribly simple premise (a man puts up a wall around his property and secretly builds therein a perfect model of his change-threatened town) is given a delicately moving texture; and "War Crimes"—the confessions of an "Andy Warhol of business" who coolly kills in his efforts to make a frozen-foods company more efficient. Carey does tend to overstate his points. His usually brisk prose sometimes lapses into precious self-consciousness. And apparent preoccupations (with adolescent sexuality, with the color blue) further constrict a generally claustrophobic, narrow atmosphere. But Carey has both a true imagination and an effective voice—and this intriguing collection indicates that there may be better, more substantial fiction to come.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1980
ISBN: 0679743324
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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