THE WORLD’S ROOM

Name: THE WORLD’S ROOM
Author: Todd London
ISBN: 1-58642-022-4

by Todd London ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2001

With graceful nuance and subtlety, London’s tale is a melancholy success, a cleanly written, emotionally credible debut that...

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Newcomer London offers a rich, nimble instance of the coming-of-age story, in which his narrator straightens himself up into life from the lurid psychological skein of his family.

Teddy Hofmann opens by confessing that he has been known as Erich—at least since his older brother, an original bearer of the name, committed suicide in 1969. The history of this oddity begins in New Jersey, where the Hofmann family (Teddy, Erich, sister Deborah, mother Lorna, father Willy) breaks apart. Lorna, a compelling, erratic character whose sense of entrapment is eloquently sketched, gathers her children together, and drives south, for Mexico. When Columbia professor Willy at last ceases supporting his wife’s apparent lark, Lorna and the kids travel north to Los Angeles, where they settle in Venice. Then, however,Teddy’s family begins to shudder under the pressures of California in the ’60s, a flighty mother, an idiosyncratically intelligent brother, and a sister bitter about her neglectful father. Erich, Lorna’s clear favorite, begins an epic poem/ballad about his life, which Teddy covets as a clue to her affection. Later, Erich is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., where he commits suicide. After his death, his grieving mother begins calling Teddy by her first son’s name—with the result that Teddy himself spends the ’70s and ’80s a man divided in himself, and unable to find his own center. A disastrous love affair, and the death of his mother, heighten his crisis of personality, while the rupture of his sister’s childless marriage reunites the children briefly, before Teddy heads south again, to Mexico, in an attempt to clarify his own history. At the close, Willy suffers a stroke that will finally kill him, and Teddy is given the chance to view his family through his father’s hidden eyes.

With graceful nuance and subtlety, London’s tale is a melancholy success, a cleanly written, emotionally credible debut that tamps its pathos with a firm, generous clarity, and so eliminates the hazy lilt of sentimentality.

Pub Date: May 7, 2001

ISBN: 1-58642-022-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS IS NOT MY MEMOIR
by André Gregory & Todd London

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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
TOM'S CROSSING
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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.