Transcendent contemporary American literary fiction, a rich and passionate story rewarding enough to be read again.
Afghanistan's brutal war and Hurricane Katrina's ominous shadow haunt Johnson’s powerful literary debut.
It is 2004, and Achilles and Troy Conroy return home to once-rural, now McMansion-ed, Maryland after tours in the same airborne infantry squad in “Goddamnistan.” The brothers expect a surprise party, but the surprise is that their father had been killed in an auto accident just as they began transit home. That shock is compounded by news that their parents had been living apart. The brothers are African-American, and their parents white. Their mother gives them each an envelope that contains information about their biological parents. Achilles refuses to open his envelope, while Troy, the younger, sets off in pursuit of his history without telling either his mother or brother. Johnson's descriptions of the very different brothers, of anecdotes from Afghanistan and of New Orleans are brilliant. Wages, Achilles' squad leader in "Goddamnistan," calls and reports that he has seen Troy in New Orleans. Achilles pursues Troy there, ostensibly for his mother, for family, but truly because he has been his brother’s keeper since youth. Troy searches drug dens, morgues and shelters for Troy without success, but over the months there, he meets and becomes lovers with Ines Delesseppes, a shelter coordinator he first believes to be white. But the Delesseppes family, ensconced in the Garden District since 1806, is thoroughly New Orleans, “we’re Creole, not mulatto, or octoroon or quadroon,” a mixture Ines celebrates in spite of her white appearance. Achilles, Troy, Ines and the men of the infantry squad are archetypical yet singularly distinctive, thoroughly and believably human. The depth, complexity and empathy within Johnson’s narrative explores issues great and small—race, color and class, the wounds of war suffered by individuals and nations, the complications and obligations of brotherhood and familial love.
Transcendent contemporary American literary fiction, a rich and passionate story rewarding enough to be read again.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56689-309-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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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