Is it possible that Portnoy's Complaint will some day be remembered only as the book that made Philip Roth famous enough to afford to write great, quiet novellas later on? Perhaps—because The Professor of Desire (1977) was the best Roth in years, and The Ghost Writer is even shorter and even better. The theme, beautifully twisting through three twirled narrative threads, is the artist's conflict between the obsessive demands of his calling and the separate but equal demands of family, of human contact. Famous New England/Jewish writer E. I. Lonoff, for instance, has surrendered wholeheartedly to the obsession; he's lordly, wise, funny, and noble (he quietly declined a National Book Award)—but he's been driving his well-bred wife crazy with decade after decade of gentle, helpless, selfish inhumanities. And our narrator, just-beginning writer Nathan Zuckerman, comes upon the Lonoffs at their most genteel-ly violent: he has been invited to dinner to meet and commune with his idol at the isolated Lonoff home in the Berkshires, and his visit (plus Lonoff's attentions toward Amy, a bright, lovely, and apparently disturbed co-ed who's in residence to catalogue Lonoff's work) sets off flurries of domestic anguish. But Nathan also has his own human/literary bind to brood upon, and he does so while staying overnight at the Lonoffs': he has written a true-to-life story—about family bickering over an inheritance—that is an embarrassment, a torture to his New Jersey-Jewish (but distinctly uncaricatured) father; the ensuing father/son dialogue (while standing on the street waiting for a bus) is as nakedly painful as anything Roth has written, quickly followed by Roth at his angry/funniest—as a pompous Jewish community leader joins the fray over the story with "Ten Questions for Nathan Zuckerman." And there's one more variation on the writer/family theme: during that same night Nathan concocts a fantasy about mysterious Amy—she is (or believes herself to be) the Anne Frank, longing to reveal herself to her grieving father but hesitating because a living Anne would rob her diary of its literary impact. Roth underlines none of this elegant theme-weaving, letting it all emerge through dazzling dialogue and his most understated, almost folktale-like prose. (Nathan describes another, flashier famous writer he has met—"He was like California itself—to get there you had to take a plane.") Elegantly floating and at the same time firmly grounded to home and heart—a sonata-like masterwork.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1979
ISBN: 0679748989
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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