Sad families, haunted by the familiar, creep inside you and linger there. A newcomer to follow.
A strong debut collection about family disasters and betrayals explores ordinary dramas extraordinarily.
Forced change—death and divorce—descend on these characters who are all caught in a kind of purgatory between happiness and failure, unsure which way to turn and often acting out criminally as a result. In “Nostalgia,” a man watches his wife and her lover move while contemplating his own arrest for breaking into O. Henry’s house. In “New Years,” a woman must confront her husband’s literal purgatory—a cracked head and hospital stay from a fall in the snow on New Year’s Eve—while confronting as well his younger girlfriend. Nature and instinct intrude throughout, our sedated civilization set beside a kind of emotional wilderness that threatens in the form of weather, vandals, and random evil thoughts. In “Riverfest,” nature becomes real in the form of water and navigating on it—or, rather, failing to, as a man discovers his own capacity for violence, thanks to another forced ending in his life. Blackwood, coordinator of the Writing Center at the University of Texas (Austin), is capable of sly, sudden poignancy—you can feel him learning and growing with sketches like “One of Us Is Hidden Away,” a convincing portrait of a young pregnant woman alone in her dilemma. The title story may owe its voice and distance to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, but these nine tales just as often recall Margaret Atwood or Michael Martone. Unique, though, is the detailing of ordinary crisis, enlivened by a delayed, drawn-out feel. Real time is revealed to be unrevealing, and characters linger like ghosts, resisting the change they will ultimately fail to avoid. Several stories about the same set of characters and events suggest that this writer has his eye on the bigger picture.
Sad families, haunted by the familiar, creep inside you and linger there. A newcomer to follow.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-87074-464-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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