The third in Price's epic Mayfield family saga: an unflinching, passionate portrayal of a dying son's last days and an elegy for a great, representative American family. Easily standing on its own, like The Surface of the Earth (1975) and The Source of Light (1981), this last of the trilogy focuses on 63-year-old Hutch Mayfield, an accomplished poet and an English professor at Duke. Wade, his only child, is ravaged by AIDS, but he doesn't call on Hutch until he is nearly blind. For the last several years, the son has been estranged from his parents, living in Manhattan with Wyatt, a young black man who had forced his lover to choose between him and the Mayfields—people he considered racists. Infected and failing himself, though, Wyatt has killed himself, leaving Wade in the care of Wyatt's overburdened sister. Now, in his son's last months, Hutch brings Wade back to North Carolina so that he can die comfortably and perhaps be reconciled with his family. Several underlying developments, however, complicate matters. Wade's mother, Ann, left her husband the year before, and now Hutch wants to shut her out of Wade's death, keeping his son all to himself. Another burden is the weight of Mayfield history, embodied by a half-black, 101-year-old cousin with a long memory, and by a white caretaker, a man who'd been Hutch's lover before he married Ann. While movingly penetrating the Mayfields' pain, Price boldly broadens his scope to encompass the stain of America's racial and sexual histories, weaving in themes of healing, redemption, and hope. Keen and clear, his elegiac prose is often astonishing in its direct and resonating power, recalling the most moving passages in Thomas Wolfe and James Agee while remaining distinctively modern in its sweep and subject matter. Powerful work that ensures the transcendence of a singular American voice.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80149-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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