Graphic and guileless, as well as underdeveloped, though admittedly intriguing if only because of the author’s youth.
A British debut novel, penned by a (then) 16-year-old author, offers the intense immediacy of teenage youth—though often without the forward momentum and richness of texture of a fully accomplished work.
The unnamed narrator is a 14-year-old girl who describes, in detail at times biting and at others long-winded, the travails of teenage life in a coastal English town. A bit awkward when she begins school, she learns how to fit in with the cool kids by letting the boys stick their hands up her skirt during break. Soon she has a clique of friends and a mean-spirited, acne-covered boyfriend named Robin, whom she meets for lunch to smoke pot and roll around on the grass with. Slowly her real psyche is revealed when Robin begins to hit her: she likes it, or, more accurately, craves the extreme sensation to feel alive. So begins the narrator’s masochism. When Robin falls in love with her, she pushes away his gentleness and begins dating 31-year-old Oliver. More interesting, though, than her romantic relationships are her familial ones—with her loving if volatile father and silent mother, left-wingers who have slipped into a life of disillusionment and endless arguing. Her parents’ fighting, the increasingly violent relationship with Oliver, and her gradual withdrawal from school life set the stage for self-mutilation as she cuts herself repeatedly—another desperate act for some kind of cold comfort. While the speaker provides a bleak, honest assessment of youthful angst, too much, given all that happens, is left unsaid or unexplained: her parents’ acceptance of a grown man sleeping with their daughter (in their house); her largely undisclosed relationships with friends; and, most importantly, the lack of self-reflection on the teller’s part.
Graphic and guileless, as well as underdeveloped, though admittedly intriguing if only because of the author’s youth.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-3700-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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