An observant debut novel in which the characters’ selflessness shines through the haze.
Debut novelist and veteran journalist Delaney offers a thriller set in a modern China that, in the mid-2000s, hasn’t become the open society that many have hoped for.
It’s the beginning of the new millennium, and the Chinese government is feverishly working to change the cityscape of Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics—and trying to make people forget things like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Journalist Jake Bradley’s friend Qiang left a good job in California’s Silicon Valley to come back to his native land and make a documentary about its rapid changes. This draws the attention of the government’s Public Security Bureau, and Qiang goes missing; Jake, who’s in love with Qiang, vows to find and rescue him. In his quest, he has the help of Qiang’s sister, Diane, and Qiang’s ex-husband, Ben. If they can blow the lid off a massive bribery scandal involving the Olympics, they’ll have enough leverage to get Qiang freed. At the same time, Delaney tells the story of Dawei, a hapless young man from the Chinese provinces who also gets mixed up in the main plot. Delaney has been covering China since the mid-1990s for such outlets as Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg News, and the South China Morning Post (where he’s currently the U.S. bureau chief), and he’s clearly the right person to tell this story—a trustworthy guide and a fine example of “write what you know.” He ably tells a tale of a China in the midst of transformation, as in a poignant vignette in which a starving Dawei stands transfixed outside a Häagen-Dazs ice-cream parlor, trying to make sense of it all. The author also shows how urban renewal also means urban upheaval, using choking dust and smog as a visible metaphor throughout the narrative. The book offers a thoughtful love story, as well; Ben is willing to take risks to free a man who divorced him, and Jake takes those same risks, not knowing if Qiang will ever reciprocate his love.
An observant debut novel in which the characters’ selflessness shines through the haze.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77161-327-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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