More an endless explanation than a sequel.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . and again and again. Estate-authorized remake of the classic Daphne du Maurier suspense novel, unimaginatively told from several points of view, in exhausting detail.
Let's see, there's Colonel Julyan, Rebecca's faithful friend, now 20 years older and much frailer but determined to tell his side of the story if his daughter Ellie would just stop coddling him. Old soldiers never die—and this one never shuts up, either. Beset by, um, dreams of Manderley, he eventually unburdens himself to Terence Gray, a historian seeking to find out more about the mysterious Rebecca while he comes to terms with the ghosts of his own past. Gray's a thoughtful, thorough chap with a knack for drawing out dotty spinsters and other odd folk. Jump back 20 years and Rebecca herself chimes in (rather melodramatically), answering most but not all of the questions raised by Julyan and Gray. Then practical-minded Ellie has her say, and the second Mrs. De Winter pops up at the very end. The story remains much the same: Rebecca, the beautiful, much-admired mistress of Manderley, is emotionally distant from her wealthy husband Max de Winter, who thinks she's having an affair, and suspects her dissolute cousin Jack Favell, among others. Then Rebecca disappears shortly after a clandestine visit to a London doctor. Was she pregnant? Was Max the father? Was she murdered? Her sailboat is dredged up a year or so later, with her corpse inside. Meantime, veteran romancer Beauman (Danger Zones, 1996, etc.) adds a Dickensian ensemble of minor characters from several generations, including orphans and actors and lovelorn ladies. A discreet attempt is made to spice things up with hints of incest and similar goings-on, but the tone is off—and noticeably lacking the plangent melancholy of the original.
More an endless explanation than a sequel.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621108-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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