Harvey squeezes some pathos out of Jake’s condition, but not much else.
A limp first novel from English author Harvey that moves back and forth between an Alzheimer’s patient’s past and present.
Jake Jameson experienced “his first true blankness” the day his wife died. They were both middle-aged when Helen was felled by a stroke and Jake was flummoxed what to do next. The couple had married young, in London, but Jake, an architect, had wanted to return to his native Lincolnshire to be close to his widowed mother Sara. They had two children. Their son Henry went to pieces after his mother died, drinking and stealing; now he’s doing time in the prison his father designed. Daughter Alice died when she was still a child. The circumstances are never made clear, and this is one of the novel’s major problems. Harvey chooses to write around events. Like Alice’s death, Helen’s death and Henry’s breakdown are not described directly, thus adding to the fog of Jake’s dementia. Perhaps Harvey is suggesting that the disorder of Alzheimer’s is the disorder of life writ large. At the heart of the novel are Jake’s relationships with four women: his mother, his wife, Joy and Eleanor. Joy is a young woman the married Jake met just once. They made love, whereupon Joy left for America, and they began a long correspondence, “the most honest thing” in Jake’s life. (The letters may be Jake’s fantasy, a poorly executed narrative trick.) As for poor Eleanor, Jake’s childhood playmate, she has loved Jake all her life and winds up as his caregiver and bed partner of last resort. There is certainly disorder in all this, though with a dash of contrivance; even Jake’s marriage to Helen, apparently a good one, may have been impaired “because there is no darkness in her.” Looming largest in Jake’s ultimate darkness are a gunshot and the color yellow, legacies of that tryst with Joy.
Harvey squeezes some pathos out of Jake’s condition, but not much else.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52763-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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