The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.
Quinones’ (Starters, 2013, etc.) collection of short stories and essays features intellectual characters examining themselves and one another as well as film and literature analyses from the author himself.
There’s a stream-of-consciousness style blanketing this book, best exemplified in the first part of the two-part title story, listing 98 examples of what Quinones calls “the one sentence short story.” They’re seemingly random assertions or snippets, mostly humorous, such as, “We spend one seventh of our lives on Tuesdays.” But a similar style appears in the fiction, as well. In “The Fizz Notorio,” for example, Eve Patricia plays her lover’s answering-machine recording, which features pieces of innocuous phone conversations. Similarly, Rolando Carspidrain in “Rumor People” overhears nearby diners at a restaurant talking about their parents’ impending ends. But while the plots are minimal, the characters are profound. Eve, for one, debates her choice to be with a man twice her age, while in “Burn Series,” shiftless Kim Demando may have a more fascinating life than her more responsible sister Dixie. Notwithstanding, the most laudable tale is perhaps the most conventional: “The Exousia,” a quirky murder mystery told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts. Quinones provides neither the dead man’s name nor details of his death, and that’s the point: what readers learn about the victim becomes his legacy, regardless of whether any of it’s true. An essay on Macbeth (“Notes on MACBETH Posthumously Left Behind by an Undistinguished Scholar”) is a little uneven, beginning as an assessment of the original play before turning into a look at several cinematic interpretations, all with equal merit. The collection ends, rather appropriately, with the metafictional second part of the title story: film enthusiast Peter pines after Myla, who apparently has no interest in him. This narrative is offset by largely superfluous notes from the author citing references or inspirations, which comprise more than half the story. Occasional tangents, such as film or book reviews, don’t seem to have been adequately researched; for example, what Quinones refers to as the “J-horror [Japanese horror] film Shutter” is actually an American remake of a Thai movie.
The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9183-7
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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