Grimly deterministic, but intermittently powerful.
Episodes from the life of a man damaged by sexual abuse and other mischief during seven years in Chicago’s state-run juvenile institutions.
“Adults are always waiting to attack and you have to do everything possible not to disturb them.” That’s Theo’s chilling insight into those seven years. Elliott has drawn on his experiences as a ward of the court in previous novels (A Life Without Consequences, 2001, etc.), and in this, his fourth, he peels the onion, first presenting Theo as an adult, then moving back and ending with a ten-year-old on the cusp of his family’s disintegration. Afraid (like everyone else) of his criminal father, raped repeatedly by a caseworker, Theo has always been a passive victim. We meet him as a struggling 33-year-old in San Francisco, searching for sexual humiliation at the hands of his dominatrix girlfriend. When Theo can’t take the heat, he flies back to Chicago: the runaway child is a runaway adult. (And Elliott is as tied to Chicago as Joyce was to Dublin.) The book has substantial narrative problems. Ambellina is Theo’s third dominatrix, which makes for wasteful rehashing. It’s hard for a passive protagonist to stir interest. Significantly, the two most involving episodes show Theo taking charge: giving a 13-year-old burglar a lesson in beating the system; stalking and confronting his erstwhile rapist. The studiedly cool adult episodes in San Francisco and Amsterdam are the least successful, and we never get a handle on his marriage to the ill-defined Zahava. The prose, however, does provide some good goose bumps once we track back to Theo’s first apartment and his Mexican roommate Maria. These two 18-year-old rape victims are both looking for more pain: “You don’t hurt me enough,” complains Maria, Theo’s one true love, and it’s the story’s most bitter irony that more beatings might have kept them together. There seems no hope for Theo, but Maria finds peace and fulfillment as a single mother.
Grimly deterministic, but intermittently powerful.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-62-1
Page Count: 207
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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