A single mother finds love and commitment with a little help from her women friends in this winsome, rather bland first novel by a Boston-based poet. Renata Rivera is fond of her handsome blond boyfriend, a bartender named Bryan, but his lack of dependability—and the terrible childhood that she's sure has permanently scarred him—is what she thinks about after she learns he's made her pregnant. Herself a product of irresponsible parenting, 26-year-old Renata opts to keep the baby but quit her waitressing job in Venice Beach, California, and move in with her divorced sister in Oregon until she gives birth—without informing the father. Shortly after Charlie is born, Renata leaves her sister as well, drifting across America by car until she settles, more or less arbitrarily, in Boston. There, she strikes up a friendship first with Eleanor, the well-bred 78-year-old widow who lives in the apartment next door, and then, after taking another waitressing job, with her babysitter, June, a pretty college student who dreams of becoming a professional dancer. Against a lulling background of bringing-up- baby trivia (Renata learns to breast-feed, gets Charlie to sleep in his crib, feeds him solid foods, etc.), the three women form a limited but genuine connection that offers them solace at a time when Eleanor is struggling with her weakening faculties, June is battling a serious eating disorder, and Renata is making her first forays into life as an independent working mom. When Bryan turns up in Boston, having learned of his son's existence, the women fear their tidy world will be destroyed. In the end, though, his appearance provides a catharsis that allows each of the three friends to deal with their private fears. Charming, but the low-key, bedtime-story tone may send some readers nodding off. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04099-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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