A cautionary tale about what happens when the party’s over.
An exiled Wall Street trader offers an unapologetic accounting of the excesses of the early 1980s.
Goolrick (Heading Out to Wonderful, 2012, etc.) is a superb writer, as evidenced by his sublime debut novel, A Reliable Wife (2009), and his brutal memoir, The End of the World as We Know It (2007). He's referred to his latest as both novel and autobiography; it carries both the artistic qualities of the former and the emotional truth of the latter, even if it is set during a well-worn moment in the American zeitgeist. The unnamed narrator is a former Wall Street hotshot who looks back on his glory days as a “Big Swinging Dick,” swimming among the other sharks. The novel presents its chapters as vignettes that depict his unmaking—think of it as the Icarus myth of a cocky young kid as filtered through the voice of a tired older man. “I say this without pride or apology,” he says. “It is a statement of irrefutable fact. I could charm a hatchling out of its egg. I could sell ice cream to Eskimos. Dead Eskimos.” It shares some aspects of similar stories, ranging from the tragicomic beats of Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis to the repulsive behaviors in films like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1989) and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—mountains of cocaine, thousand-dollar prostitutes, and bro-enabled debauchery are all on full display. Fortunately, Goolrick’s measured pace and insightful revelations save it from becoming a mockery. For starters, Goolrick worked in advertising, not finance, and so there’s no complex financial wizardry to detract from the core story. More importantly, it doesn’t carry the obscene celebratory tone of some of its analogues. Goolrick is focused on the idea of loss and redemption and shows the small ways by which we become human again. As our man burns through his money and reputation, loses his place on Mount Olympus, and eventually becomes a bookseller, the novel does its best to show the price of flying too high.
A cautionary tale about what happens when the party’s over.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-420-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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