by Toni Jordan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2013
A small treasure, from the author of the wonderful romantic comedy Addition (2009).
Spanning World War II to 9/11, Australian novelist Jordan delivers a witty and wise family saga.
The novel begins in 1939 with Kip Westaway, a 15-year-old resident of a working-class Melbourne suburb. His father has recently died (having fallen, drunk, off a trolley car); they’ve had to take in a boarder; Kip has quit school to do odd jobs for the furniture shop next door. Kip goes about his day: a scolding from his sour mother, Jean, the usual jousting with his twin brother, Francis, a bloody knee thanks to the neighborhood hoodlums, comfort from his beloved older sister Connie, a brief chat with the most beautiful girl in Melbourne, the gift of a shilling from his kindhearted employer, Mr. Hustings—inconsequential events that begin to resonate with each ensuing chapter. Sixty years later, we find Kip’s daughter Stanzi in her office, preparing to frame her dad’s lucky shilling, until it disappears; perhaps her kleptomaniac client is to blame. This is followed by Jack’s story: The only son of Mr. Hustings, Jack has just returned from a rural sheep station and is at a crossroads: He wants to go back to the country but feels the pressure to enlist and fight the Nazis, then he sees Connie from his bedroom window and can think of nothing else. Skipping back and forth in time, from one character to another, Jordan builds a gorgeously layered story examining the innocent choices that shape a life, a family: the failures of favored son Francis, Kip’s grandson Alec’s fateful discovery, his mother Charlotte’s unplanned pregnancy, Jean’s heartbreaking maternal advice. Jordan closes the novel with Connie’s chapter. By now, everyone’s fate is known, but the love story between Connie and Jack—inspired by the novel's cover, a striking archival photo of a woman being hoisted up to a train window to kiss a departing soldier—is so romantically tragic, it feels that the story’s really been about them all along.
A small treasure, from the author of the wonderful romantic comedy Addition (2009).Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-92192-283-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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