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THE BREAKS

Name: THE BREAKS
Author: Richard Price
ISBN: 0312566514

A NOVEL

by Richard Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1982

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Price (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers) left the Bronx behind with Ladies Man, putting all his remarkably pent-up novelistic energies onto the shoulders of increasingly articulate but shudderingly jumpy young men—the newest of which is Peter Keller, this book's narrator and (in a way) only character. Peter is the first college grad in his lower-middle-class Yonkers family—and as if that is some obscure sin, he promptly sabotages a brightish future by taking demeaning jobs (the Post Office, telephone solicitation). Then, to provoke his wimpy father and stepmother even further, Peter gets himself into real trouble by making bomb threats on the phone. He's caught, probationed—and, in the worst of several plot-lurches here, he's rescued by his friend Fat Jack, who (as department chairman) hires Peter to be a freshman-composition instructor at his alma mater in upstate New York. And there, in the small college town, Peter comes to meet older-woman Kim Fonesca—who's separated from husband Tony (a streetwise yet failed writer also on the faculty), who writes stories herself (more successfully than Tony), but who soon reveals that she needs a regular beat-me-then-stroke-me cycle from men. Hall a dozen times in this longish book, then, Price fastens onto a meld of intricate emotional needs—ambition, masochism, self-destruction—and astounding hysterics: Peter with his parents; Kim's sexual requirements; Peter's obsessive need to never let things well enough alone; Tony's desperate search for his once-glimpsed promise. Each time, however, the tension and energy collapse: each emotional drama gets caught against the wall as Price revolves the door too fast. And, since everyone in the novel—like Peter—turns out to be an obscure sinner-and-atoner, a whining monotony eventually takes over. Still, there are wonderful pages here: Price in his junior-Lenny-Bruce suit halls clown everything second-rate in extraordinary paragraphs of description; Peter at his best recalls some of Philip Roth's men, who are never unaware of how terribly they are mucking things up. And, though flabby and badly timed as a novel (the good climax comes far too late to be truly effective), this is grimly involving in fits and starts—and evidence of a stretching, growing, if problematic talent.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982

ISBN: 0312566514

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LUSH LIFE
by Richard Price

- BOOK REVIEW
SAMARITAN
by Richard Price

- BOOK REVIEW
FREEDOMLAND
by Richard Price

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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.