“Some writers have less fuel in the tank than others,” one of his characters laments, but Russo himself is chugging along...
Four brief but potent and surprising tales of midlife crises from the ever dependable Russo (Everybody’s Fool, 2016, etc.).
The main characters in each of these stories are accomplished people who are thrust into what initially seem like modest predicaments. The professor in “Horseman” is dealing with a plagiarizing student; the professor in “Voice” is squabbling with his brother on a vacation in Italy; the real estate agent in “Intervention” is having a hard time moving a hoarder’s home; and the novelist in “Milton and Marcus” is wary of the producers asking him to revisit a screenplay he sketched out years before. But with a keen eye for detail, dashes of humor, and a knack for bouncing his characters’ presents against their pasts, Russo makes these stories robust studies about the regrets they’ve picked up over the years. In “Voice,” the longest and best of this batch, the professor’s estrangement from his brother stokes memories of a recent scandal over his treatment of a closed-off student, which in turn influences his careful flirtation with a woman in his tour group. For the professor in “Horseman,” the bad student is a prompt for her to consider whether her professional coolness has served her well either in academia or her home life. As ever, Russo is superb at finding spots of comedy in these situations. The hoarder’s home has “an espresso machine the size of a snowmobile”; the frustrated screenwriter thinks, “a smart man would’ve left it right there, but he didn’t seem to be around.” This gives the four stories a peculiar sameness; the narration shares a melancholy/buoyant tone regardless of setting. But the autumnal mood fits for these tales of reckonings, and Russo rarely wastes a word, interweaving details and dialogue into master classes on storytelling.
“Some writers have less fuel in the tank than others,” one of his characters laments, but Russo himself is chugging along just fine.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94772-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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