Carlson serves up a nice commentary on the entertainment racket, and with carefully crafted prose that too often goes on...
Talky historical novel about the business of the freak show business.
It never amounts to a tour de force, but Carlson’s debut does a creditable job of bringing 1840s New York to life—the language is right, the clothing correct, the mundane details of ordinary encounters just so. Trouble is, much of the novel concerns encounters very far out of the ordinary, with required lashings of willingly suspended disbelief that venture into the realm of magical realism, always a difficult genre for an American to pull off. The setup is promising: A staff taxidermist at a New York natural history museum, Emile Guillaudeu, is required to remake his collections to suit new owner P.T. Barnum, who has little use for the stuffed owls of old and is intent on crafting the cabinet of curiosities that would make his name. The transformation is not easy, and not eagerly awaited by every member of the public, either; says one protestor against the scheme, “Barnum’s Congress is an abomination! It must be stopped!” Alas for Guillaudeu, the rubes require constant entertainment, and so his glass cases are out in the hallway and strange bits of living creation are in. Enter Ana Swift, a giantess, who would rather be anywhere else but playing her part in the freak show to earn her keep. Ana is self-aware, smart, concerned for the well-being of her fellows as they’re jostled by crowds and robbed by management—a case in point being the so-called Aztec Children, who, as their keeper puts it, were “malnourished and frightened” but were kind enough to lead him “into the jungle to the site of their former glory,” revealing urns of gold so abundant “that Cortés himself would have been jealous.” Both Guillaudeu and Swift, then, are on a collision course with the elusive Barnum, the Godot of the piece—and when the crash comes, it does so, of course, tragically.
Carlson serves up a nice commentary on the entertainment racket, and with carefully crafted prose that too often goes on just a beat too long. Still, a refreshing take on an aspect of and time in American history that are too little known.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58642-184-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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