Sterile and lifeless.
Memory-erasing drugs are the centerpiece of a bleak, absurdist vision of contemporary life.
Our narrator is a salesman with no name. His current territory is Arizona, where he sells a chemical product called STM (short-term memory eroder); he also peddles LTM. When he’s not working, he does drugs: some company product, which makes him the ultimate unreliable narrator, plus old favorites like cocaine. He also drinks, swims, and has sex. The sex may be with men or women, but it’s always casual (“fucking strangers is what everyone is doing these days”). Biographical fragments (childhood in Spain, divorced parents) don’t flesh him out. He may have a girlfriend in Tokyo, but she stays in the shadows, and his only relationship is with the Company that supplies him with product. The Company communicates through e-mails. Salesmen sometimes steal product and disappear, so they are frequently tested. When the narrator tests positive, he is suspended. His voice is deadpan and without affect. He will move from Arizona to Asia (Bangkok, Saigon, Tokyo), but he is still a man on a treadmill, going through the same motions; there is always a stranger to have sex with as planes fall out of the sky and suicides disturb hotel rooms. Spanish novelist Loriga (My Brother’s Gun, 1997) could have added the spice of confrontations (with the Company or with the Promise Keepers, white Americans who kill the “memory murderers”), but he prefers to document the anomie of listless consumers around the world, not exactly uncharted territory. The narrator winds up in a Berlin hospital with aphasia. After tests, he will be fired by the Company and branded SICA (suspected of illegal chemical activity). At the end, he’s back in Arizona listening to a German veteran of WWII and pioneer of memory elimination, K. L. Krumper, who exists only on a monitor; his brain has been transplanted into a young Mexican girl. The author seems less than fully engaged in these tired science fiction devices.
Sterile and lifeless.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4147-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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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