Rich, confounding and absorbing—utterly irresistible.
A dying town symbolizes arcs separately traced by people who abandon it and others who stubbornly stay home, believing change must be for the best, in Russo’s (The Whore’s Child: and Other Stories, 2005, etc.) crowded sixth novel.
Its setting (fictional Thomaston in upstate New York) resembles that of both his early books set thereabouts (Mohawk, The Risk Pool) and his New England–based Pulitzer-winner Empire Falls. Thomaston is the site of the now-defunct tannery that had provided jobs and is now suspected of causing cancer. It’s the hometown of Lou C. Lynch (tormented, inevitably, by the lasting nickname “Lucy”) and his wife Sarah, now 60-ish and hoping to pass on their family’s “empire” of convenience stores to the next generation. A narrative composed by Lou (about his hometown and himself) is juxtaposed with memories of his childhood and youth, and with a parallel narrative set in Venice, where the Lynches’ childhood friend Bobby Marconi now lives as a gifted, renegade artist—and a cancer victim. Nobody now writing rivals Russo at untangling the knots of family connection, love and sexuality, ambition and compromise, fidelity and betrayal that link and afflict a formidable gallery of vividly observed, generously portrayed characters. Prominent among them: Lou’s eternal-optimist father and namesake; his stoical mother Tessa; the lower-class boys who taunt and threaten him and the girls he turned to (and sometimes loved); and the luckless Marconis, victimized by a viciously abusive father. Every page bristles with life. True, many of the details and motifs (e.g., an embattled family business; prosperity transformed by inevitable change; a black-sheep sibling) closely echo the matter of Empire Falls. Nevertheless, this is a wise, uplifting book: a big-hearted, often comic, yet sturdily realistic testament to the resiliency of ordinary people who surprise us, and themselves, by coping, rebuilding and moving on.
Rich, confounding and absorbing—utterly irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41495-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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
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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