Zuckerman in pain—physical pain, psychic pain, existential pain—as Roth continues to follow his nakedly, overbearingly autobiographical alter-ego: what was high art in The Ghost Writer became a glossy, so-so hybrid in Zuckerman Unbound. . . and has now become something intermittently powerful or funny, strangely fascinating, yet grimly embarrassing, It's 1973. Zuckerman, 40, author of the notorious Carnovsky (read Portnoy's Complaint), is still haunted by his father's death-bed curse, his brother's hatred, and now his mother's death. He hasn't been able to write a decent page in months and months. He has "lost his subject." He's losing his hair. Above all, Zuckerman has lost his health, having become half-immobilized by chronic neck and back pain: he has tried a grisly litany of doctors, including an analyst; he spends much of the day on his back on a "playmat," numbed with vodka and Percodan, ministered to (sexually and otherwise) by a quartet of girlfriends. And his only zest comes in brooding furiously over an attack on him by one Milton Appel (clearly modeled on Irving Howe)—recalling Appel's favorable review of Zuckerman's first fiction (near-exact paraphrase of Howe's actual words about Goodbye, Columbus), stewing over this recent abuse, arguing with it, indulging in unspoken tirades of retaliatory invective. How, then, can Zuckerman escape the "selfness of pain," the selfness of his writing, all this dead-end writhing, this entrapment in the past? By becoming a doctor, he thinks. So eventually he takes off to visit an old doctor-chum in Chicago, looking for reed-school-admission help. But by now he is flying from his drug/booze saturation: he hires a limo, using the name Milton Appel, "kike-pornographer," supposed editor of Lickety Split; in this role, he subjects the woman chauffeur to ugly tour-de-force fantasy-arias about porn, Hugh Hefner, Jewishness, "Appel's" life; and he winds up running amok in a Jewish cemetery—nearly throttling a grieving old man ("the last of the fathers demanding to be pleased"), fracturing his own head on a footstone, landing in the hospital. . . yet still determined to be an M.D., to "unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his." Roth's talent for half-comic ghastliness flickers vigorously throughout this nightmare-novel; his bravura wordsmanship—fine-tuned, orchestrated colloquiallism—gets ample (if contrived) exposure. But, in terms of craft, this may be Roth's weakest fiction: repetitious, unshapely, registering as a belabored short story—with a more-of-the-same ending that doesn't seem like the close of a novel, let alone the close of a trilogy. And, more important, the autobiographical premise breaks down badly here—as Roth shifts constantly, uncomfortably, between self-pity and self-deprecation, repentance and defiance, occasionally lifting the proceedings onto a more resonant level (through an almost Kafkaesque treatment of pain-as-metaphor). . . but more often sinking down into the petulance, pettiness, and sentimentality of one writer's woes and feuds. Still, if some readers will be lured (or put off) by Roth's roman clef specifics, others will be drawn to the Chinese-box ironies (Zuckerman yearning to escape "self" in '73, Roth at the summit of "self" in '83)—and to the squirming spectacle of a writer trying to find a bearable approach for fictional self-examination, trying to defend himself and crucify himself at the same time.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1983
ISBN: 0679749020
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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