A thoughtful portrait of lives both destroyed and fortified by faith, though the reach of this ambitious debut novel...
In Murphy’s debut novel, a primarily Catholic community in the Boston area struggles with diverging attitudes of faith in the aftermath of sex abuse scandals and family traumas.
Miracles, according to one of the many priests in this novel, are “one big headache for the Church.” Thus the community of Faneuil has many headaches in August 2002, when a giant, glowing image of the Virgin Mary appears on a wall at the local hospital. Like a faith-based Rorschach test, the image is interpreted by each viewer through a unique psychological prism. Hospital president Dr. Edward Cronin, a callous opportunist, gleefully folds this “miracle” into his morally corrupt plan to enrich himself with wealth and power by creating a shrine at the site. Yet the appearance of the mysterious image is surprisingly reassuring to some, including Dr. Tom Rowley, who has known no peace since his only child shot himself in December 1994, an event described in the book’s opening pages. As one character remarks in the book’s sad conclusion, “There’s no end to the Tommy Rowley tragedy.” Others are repulsed by what they assume to be a fake image, another example of religious manipulation, while still others find spiritual renewal by sharing the alleged miracle. In the action-filled week following the image’s appearance, several convoluted conspiracies and revenge plots are discovered, the Catholic hierarchy of Boston is upended, some families break apart and others draw closer together. All this compressed action comes at a cost. With dozens of characters listed in the book’s preface, pruning the cast would have created a more coherent narrative. The author is extremely well-versed in Catholic ritual and theology, which lends depth to the extensive discussions among the clergy. Although sexual abuse by priests is at the book’s heart, readers don’t witness revenge against those who committed the horrific crimes and those who covered it up. However, Murphy makes abundantly and painfully clear just how much suffering is felt by survivors and their families.
A thoughtful portrait of lives both destroyed and fortified by faith, though the reach of this ambitious debut novel ultimately exceeds its grasp.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475956603
Page Count: 412
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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