Imaginative but leaves little room for the reader's own imagination.
A zany collection that explores alcoholism, modern Detroit, and characters who yearn for “the tender warmth of female companionship.”
To describe it, Hughes’ slim 16-story debut seems eclectic. There are stories with elements of magical realism; for example, “Lucky Fucking Day,” in which a pumpkin-headed man lets his mistress carve his face, and “Wood for Rhonda,” in which a witch, trying to increase her husband’s virility, turns his body into a woodlike substance, a curse he begins seeing in other men around town. Then there are stories which, in the Raymond Carver lineage, might be described as Rust Belt Gothic and are characterized by human wreckage, alcoholism, and characters yearning for physical connection. One of these, “When Drink, Drugs, and Floor Polish Steal Your Youth and Your Woman,” gives us a thoroughly dysfunctional couple who decide to burn their house rather than be evicted from it; in the process they rekindle their sexual appreciation for one another. Then, finally, there are the George Saunders–esque stories, like “I Am Still Learning About the World,” the narrator of which replaces his ex-girlfriend with a robot look-alike—he buys the “ ‘Irish Beauty’ upgrade kit”—and this, rather than creeping the ex-girlfriend out, somehow wins her back. But though the stories, when thus described, imply a wide-ranging imagination, they in fact share more than they don’t. Every story has a first-person male narrator. In nearly every story the love object is female. Alcohol abounds. So does stilted dialogue (“It’s finally Friday,” one character says. “Is it really? Holy shit!” says the narrator). The attempts at humor tend toward the sophomoric, and Hughes’ narrators nearly always overexplain their emotions rather than trusting the reader to insert their own. These last two tendencies are in play when the narrator of “Ted and His Heartbeat,” looking for weed in his mother’s underwear drawer, finds several G-strings and thinks: “Dang, Mom! I didn’t know how she could wear this shit, bisecting her butt cheeks. Ugh. I just couldn’t take thinking of her in these skimpy nothings.”
Imaginative but leaves little room for the reader's own imagination.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8143-4588-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Wayne State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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