A clever and almost consistently amusing debut, part Nabokov and part John Irving, about the writing of ``a self-referent novel about life and death.'' The life is that of Darren Swenson, a native midwesterner who grows up gay and disillusioned with his corn-fed all-American ancestry and milieu (Immaculatum, Kansas), strikes out for Manhattan and brief fulfillment working as a call boy (for ``Star Studs''), and makes his way to the City of Light, where, HIV- positive and ebullient to the last, he plans to spend his remaining days surrounded by sympathetic lovers and friends. The story of that life is presented to us as it is written, reconstructed, and imagined by the narrator, an American-born Frenchman named Philippe Tapon (hence both author and character), who, like everyone else outside of Kansas, falls victim to Darren's considerable charm and agrees to write a novel based on the dying American's life. Philippe's version includes his own stops and starts and second thoughts as he's getting material about his subject, many deliberate misdirections (such as scenes we assume really occurred, until the narrator confesses he has invented them), distorted chronology and alternative versions of episodes and conversations and fantasy sequences (for example, a phone call Philippe imagines receiving from Darren after he imagines Darren has died). There are even appearances by editor-publisher ``Billy'' Abrahams and by an urbane gay novelist (Edward Gray) who's obviously a stand-in for Edmund White. It all sounds suffocatingly coy, but it's actually quite lively—even if Darren's unquenchable joie de vivre makes him sound a bit like a rustic Auntie Mame. Tapon even gets good mileage out of a tissue of allusions to and steals from ``Philippe's'' favorite literary works (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and ``The Wasteland,'' among others). An assured and entertaining debut that will make readers curious to see what its talented author will turn his hand to next.
Pub Date: March 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-525-94239-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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