An entertaining tale rich in schadenfreude as bad things happen to a hapless billionaire.
A gimlet-eyed writer observes the life of a New York property baron as it unravels amid personal, business, and legal woes.
Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story, 2015, etc.) is a screenwriter and playwright whose fifth novel recalls Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities—except the rich guy is an implausibly good person. Jay Gladstone inherited and expanded a New York real estate empire that has allowed him, by the year 2012, to own five homes and a professional basketball team, practice philanthropy, and bask in a well-buffed public persona. His biggest flaw is pride that slides toward myopic self-righteousness and can render him dangerously uncool on hot-button issues. Life is generally good, though—and then it isn’t. His star ballplayer doesn’t like his proposed new contract. Jay’s second wife wants a baby, which goes against the prenup. Jay’s college-age daughter from marriage No. 1 is sleeping with a black female classmate, who disrupts the family Seder with a pointed comment on black slaves vs. the Jews’ biblical slavery. Jay’s cousin and partner in the family firm is embezzling. But Jay is coping well until he drives his car into the aforementioned ballplayer after catching him in bed with Mrs. Gladstone No. 2. The scene is recorded on her smartphone and soon goes public, along with Jay’s statement: "Why does everyone in this family need to have sex with black people?" Racism has been a simmering theme in the book since a white cop shot a black man early on, through the Seder, and in the college students’ debate on racial politics as they prepare a play on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Now racism hangs heavy on Jay and his legal predicament, which dovetails with the political ambitions of a district attorney who needs a showcase trial with a racial component to appeal to various slices of the electorate. Greenland takes a Dickensian delight in letting the plot sprawl with parallels, digressions, false leads, and twists. The ultimate twist may be the ending, which puts Jay’s possible absolution in the unlikeliest quarter.
An entertaining tale rich in schadenfreude as bad things happen to a hapless billionaire.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-462-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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