An evocative depiction of the natures of womanhood and discipleship.
A debut novel in which two young women separated by centuries seek personal redemption.
Kimber’s novel opens with idealistic but experience-hardened Jennifer attending the bedside of Jeb, the provocative avant-garde artist who’s been a kind of cult-messiah figure to her; now, Jeb is dying of AIDS. Jeb has accumulated many “disciples” in a life devoted as much to drinks and debauchery as to his art, and Jennifer finds herself in uneasy competition mainly with steely Vina, Jeb’s manager and representative. Both women come from sketchy, fragmented pasts, and both have present-day treasures: For Vina, it’s her young son, Kevin, and for Jennifer, it’s her late mother’s copy of The Fragrant Ones by R.F. Friedlander, inscribed with a verse from the Gospel of Mark: “I tell you the truth…wherever the Gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” In the narrative’s alternating chapters, readers get the story of this enigmatic “she”—a Jewish woman in the first century named Reumah, divorced by her husband and degraded into prostitution, then befriended by a charismatic rabbi who meets her at a well and fills her imagination with hope. After thus giving readers a New Testament reference point, Kimber goes on to skillfully weave a multilayered story, half in Jeb’s present-day world of art galleries, wine, and drugs and half in the New Testament world of Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Nicodemus. The plotlines are united both in their common examination of the nature of messiah-hood and in their intricate, satisfying portrayal of young women facing tough choices in an unsentimental world. “One religion was basically the same as any other,” Jennifer thinks. “Try hard. Worship something good and be a good person, whatever that means to you.” But the story’s grappling with the nature of faith—ranging from the savage cruelties inflicted on Reumah to the lies of convenience told by Jennifer—is far more complex than such easy formulas would indicate.
An evocative depiction of the natures of womanhood and discipleship.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494810245
Page Count: 364
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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