A sad but elegantly told story punctuated with photos, letters and a verisimilitude that elevate its fictional ambitions.
Through fiction and the imprecision of memory, a writer examines the challenging relationship between his grandparents.
After garnering raves and sales for his first novel, Block (The Story of Forgetting, 2008) once again delves into that murky area between lost love, memory and deeply held melancholy. This round, the author builds his story largely on the true-life history of his grandparents, who found themselves at an impasse when his grandmother had his grandfather committed to a mental institution. The novel opens on Echo Cottage, as the writer contemplates his steely-eyed grandmother, Katharine Mead Merrill, in 1989. At 69, Alzheimer’s has started to chip away at long-held memories. Then the story lurches forward to July of 1962, finding the grandfather Frederick Francis Merrill in a drug-induced stupor at the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, where he has been incarcerated for a long history of drinking, bad behavior and, finally, flashing two old ladies on a New Hampshire back road. Block examines, through cautious language and nearly imperceptible sympathy, the events that have brought the couple from here to there. And it is true that Katherine is in an awful state. “Katherine is a mother of four, with a husband in a mental hospital,” Block writes. “The winter is coming, and the money is running out. Her marriage has failed, everyone knows it, and she has no real friends. Her relatives have turned against her husband first, and now they are turning on her too. She can no long be anything other than what everyone plainly sees her to be.” But there is sympathy to be unearthed for Frederick, too, as Block expertly captures the frustration and personal devastation wreaked by his grandfather’s depression, equally hard on him as it is on his family. As he suffers in the institution he dubs “Horrorland,” Katherine begins to reconsider her responsibility for her husband’s condition.
A sad but elegantly told story punctuated with photos, letters and a verisimilitude that elevate its fictional ambitions.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6945-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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