Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.
Cranny’s second outing (The Storm, originally published as On Us They Poor Children, not reviewed) explores the disintegrating cohesiveness of an Irish Catholic community in 1957 Brooklyn.
Young Father Darcy gives a sermon preaching inclusiveness that makes him unpopular in a neighborhood already edgy with suspicion and resentment about encroaching change. The Dodgers are threatening to leave Ebbets Field for LA. Italians have already moved in and there are rumors about blacks and Hispanics. Red Dahlgren and his sister Annie, however, both feel stifled by the neighborhood’s narrow-mindedness. Red, a police detective secretly plans to escape to California with his Italian fiancée as soon as he can bring himself to tell his widowed mother. Annie, a high-school senior, dreams of escaping through her college scholarship. Although officially going steady with a luggish neighborhood boy, she is actually having a serious love affair with Toby Walters, the one black kid in her class, who also happens to be athletic and brilliant enough to have earned his own scholarship to Columbia. When Annie is raped and murdered, suspicion falls on Toby, and the crowd at Kerrigan’s bar shows definite mob tendencies. But Red’s buddy Jack Treacy, who returned from Korea emotionally damaged, suspects himself. A hopeless binge drunk, he wakes up the morning after Annie’s death with no memory of the previous night but with a scratched face and bloodied clothes. In guilty panic he goes to Father Darcy, who takes him to the precinct where Red, unbelievably assigned his own sister’s case, and his Jewish partner refuse to consider Treacy’s evidence. They want to believe Toby is guilty, and they have a witness, the unlikable Harry who stole Red’s first girlfriend while Red was in Korea. In a weird twist, the false witness, lying out of weakness, is portrayed as villainous, while the real villain comes across as troubled but basically decent.
Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56649-232-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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