Should be tucked into every Midwestern beach bag.
Summer people, townies, migrant workers and an Indian jostle one another in newcomer Amick’s fond, wise and thoroughly enjoyable look at a gentrifying midwestern vacationland.
The increasingly upscale resort and farming village of Weneshkeen sits somewhere south of the Michigan Hamptons, occupying the land between little Lake Meenigeesis and nearby Lake Michigan. Most of the Ojaanimiziibii Indians who greeted the first European explorers and opportunists have long since been displaced, but Navy SEAL, Vietnam vet and indigenous Indian cynic Roger Drinkwater, comfortably self-employed with a financial cushion from the nearby casino, has hung onto his little piece of the increasingly valuable local property. An eligible but prickly bachelor, Roger spends the long hours away from his not very demanding jerky business waging a clandestine war on the immensely irritating and numerous jet skis that make his morning swim across Lake Meenigeesis more and more dangerous. Well-built Deputy Janey Struska has her eye on Roger both as a suspect in the jet-ski vandalisms and as a pretty good-looking middle-aged Indian, so she has mixed feelings about her non-native Sheriff’s dogged pursuit of Roger as a danger to civilization. The jet-ski war is just one of a dozen or so story lines to be worked out over the length of this one pleasant summer. Among the Weneshkeenites with woes to work out are the Reverend Eugene Reecher, a widowed, retired and devilishly horny Presbyterian minister; Mark Starkey, an aimless teenager whose cute ass has gotten him mixed up with a pretty but very screwed-up rich girl; Kurt Lasko, a divorced septic-tank cleaner and Kimberley, his clever daughter; and the vonBushbergers, long-time cherry farmers whose family life has suddenly gone global. And at the edge of the village, rattling around alone in his architectural landmark, in frantic search for new revenue streams, lurks ex-dot-com zillionaire Noah Yoder, the man whose possible connection to David Letterman could change everyone’s life.
Should be tucked into every Midwestern beach bag.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42350-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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