bookshelf

MOSAIC MAN

Name: MOSAIC MAN
Author: Ronald Sukenick
ISBN: 1-57366-079-5

by Ronald Sukenick ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1999

bookshelf

An implausibly likable rant, thinly disguised as fiction, by cyberpunk novelist Sukenick (Doggy Bag, 1994, etc.). Had Henry Miller been a nice Jewish boy, he might have left us something along the lines of Sukenick’s latest—a sort of portmanteau omnibus of theory, memoir, history, fiction, daydream, acid trip, and nightmare. Narrated by “Ron,” it moves between 1940s Brooklyn (with the war in Europe rapidly coming to a close) and France in the near future (under a government controlled by the National Front). As a boy growing up in Coney Island, Ron found himself astonished by the stories of Nazi death camps; now, he takes part (along with Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis) in a bombing raid on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Paris. There are recollections of Ron’s first trips to Europe in the 1950s, when he hung out with the Paris Review crowd on the Left Bank, got drunk with the children of Nazis in Heidelberg dueling clubs, and (later) hobnobbed with Solidarity protesters in Poland. But neither Ron nor his story moves in a straight line, and there are frequent digressions on, for example, the meaning of Deuteronomy, the patterns of history, the differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, and the discovery of the Golden Calf worshiped by the ancient Israelites. What is history, after all, but our telling of it? “There are Jews today who worship the Golden Calf, Ron knows. But they know they shouldn—t. Just as Ron knows he shouldn—t be writing novels.” But, of course, he isn—t: Ron is just thinking out loud, imagining what it would be like if Simone Weil were still alive in Paris or Elvis Presley were Jewish. If it’s a story you want, well, there are places you could go. But basically Ron’s advice is: “Stop bitching . . . Jews have more fun.” Insane, pointless, incoherent, and fascinating: Sukenick has created an idea game that is just lighthearted enough to be fun, and just monomaniacal enough to be compelling.

Pub Date: March 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-57366-079-5

Page Count: 260

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

bookshelf

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

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.