A novel that strikes all the proper notes but doesn’t quite blend them together or inspire.
An upper-middle-class woman’s life and marriage are disturbed when she suspects her beloved older brother is a serial bomber in this quiet second novel from Kegan (The Baby, 1990), inspired by the story of David Kaczynski, who turned in his brother for being the Unabomber.
The daughter of an old, progressive, politically influential California family, Natalie Askedahl lives comfortably with her lawyer husband and two daughters, the oldest of whom is an academic prodigy. She remains distant from her siblings—sanctimonious hippie sister Sara and recluse brother Bobby, to whom she had once been deeply devoted. Bobby’s mathematical genius imploded on itself years ago, and he now lives a life of isolation in a cabin in the wilderness. One day, while examining a paranoid letter from Bobby to their mother, Natalie notices striking similarities to the manifesto of a serial bomber who has been targeting faculty members at California’s public universities. After some deliberation, she turns this information over to the FBI. As her family’s illusions about Bobby rapidly unravel, Natalie clings to the sweetest memories of her brother and probes at the more painful ones. The uncovered layers are predictable, and none of the revelations feel particularly fresh. Natalie's unease about her brilliant daughter’s resemblance to Bobby’s young self is present but underexplored, and her marriage troubles hit all the expected beats. She's a milquetoast, though it's not entirely her fault—when she asserts herself and makes her own choices, the other characters unfairly eviscerate her for it. The novel comes most alive when class anxieties and clashing politics surface. “My parents had devoted their lives to the vision of California that my country-club in-laws had proudly voted to undo,” she muses in a rare moment of anger. If only there’d been more of them.
A novel that strikes all the proper notes but doesn’t quite blend them together or inspire.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0931-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PROFILES
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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