LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS

Name: LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS
Author: Susan Carol McCarthy
ISBN: 0-553-80169-4

by Susan Carol McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 29, 2002

A strong debut though also flawed, most notably by inconsistency in voice. Usually, Reesa has the true perspective of a...

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Real-life events of the burgeoning civil-rights movement of 1951 are blended with one white girl’s struggle to understand the murder of her black friend.

The South doesn’t get any deeper than Central Florida in 1951, especially for the McMahon family, northerners who came to Florida for the citrus business and have found a community both of cruel traditions and hope. Thirteen-year-old Reesa’s narrative begins with the brutal murder of her friend Marvin Cully. A surrogate big brother and employee of the McMahon’s, young Marvin is beaten to death by the Klan, who mistake him for someone else. Unfortunately, small-town Mayflower and the surrounding burgs are indeed Klan country, members coming from both law enforcement and the area’s most powerful families. The death of one black boy means nothing. Even the local FBI are in the pockets of, or at least sympathetic to, the Klan. The loss of innocence for Reesa (months tick by as Marvin’s murder goes unsolved) is played against the early struggles of Civil Rights as Thurgood Marshall visits the McMahons to investigate Marvin’s death. Reesa’s family becomes ever more involved as the Klan becomes more violent—the historically real bombings of black neighborhoods, synagogues, and Catholic churches in Miami that year are tied to McCarthy's characters, both fictional and real. When Reesa's little brother Ren is grazed by a Klan bullet, the McMahon family, with the help of Marvin’s parents, hatch a plan with the FBI to bring down the local Klan.

A strong debut though also flawed, most notably by inconsistency in voice. Usually, Reesa has the true perspective of a child; at other times McCarthy gives her an older, overly intellectual understanding of events—testament to the challenge of telling an intricate tale through the eyes of one unable to grasp all of life’s complexities.

Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2002

ISBN: 0-553-80169-4

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A PLACE WE KNEW WELL
by Susan Carol McCarthy

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUE FIRES
by Susan Carol McCarthy

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.