A gifted writer, Hall offers a compelling, lyrical story rich in observation and symbolism.
Hall (The Beautiful Indifference, 2013, etc.) explores the emotional turmoil following a wildlife biologist's return home to Lowther Valley in England's Cumbria.
Rachel may be a native Cumbrian, but she’s dwelt for a decade near Idaho’s Chief Joseph Peak, monitoring the wolf reintroduction, when she receives word from England that her mother is fading. She’s also received a generous offer from Thomas Pennington, Earl of Annerdale, who wants her to reintroduce wolves into a controlled environment on his vast Cumbrian estate. During a visit home, she makes a spare reconciliation with her prickly mother and rejects the earl’s offer; then she’s back in Idaho and finds herself pregnant by a friend and co-worker. That discovery comes simultaneously with word of her mother’s suicide, and Rachel decides to accept Pennington’s offer. She intends to have an abortion in Cumbria, but "delaying, ruminating, caught between states," she chooses motherhood. Telling the story in simple, crystalline sentences and punctuation-free dialogue, Hall peppers the narrative with diamond-hard phrases: a wolf’s eyes are "keen as gold, sorrowless"; an old-growth Cumbrian forest is a "dark old republic." Centering the story are the wolves: "ghost-like, elegant, frivolous"; "never without enemies, they are too successful a creature, too good at what they do." Hall also deftly carves characters—Pennington’s troubled son, Leo, with "a crackle around him: an unwellness, an ill-mood"; and the entitled and privileged earl himself, "subject to different laws of gravity, that’s all." As Rachel, "a creature hostage to maternity, metamorphosed," plunges into love with her newborn son, the wolf project is sabotaged when a gate is deliberately left open, a point at which Hall binds the narrative threads together in a satisfying conclusion.
A gifted writer, Hall offers a compelling, lyrical story rich in observation and symbolism.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-220847-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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