SUMMER CROSSING

Name: SUMMER CROSSING
Author: Truman Capote
ISBN: 1-4000-6522-4

by Truman Capote ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2005

A wonderful discovery for the scholars, who will find Capote in possession, in his early 20s, of a confident voice and fine...

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A work of literary archaeology that reckons, in a roundabout way, as Capote’s debut—save that he put it aside to work on Other Voices, Other Rooms, and this elegant, brief novel was lost.

Lost, literally, for when Capote abandoned Brooklyn for better things following the publication of In Cold Blood—or so the story goes—he left a trunk containing the manuscript of Summer Crossing behind. Someone rescued it, and now it is the world’s to enjoy. Capote, at his best, was nearly unbeatable; here, young but already with a jaded worldview, he peeks behind the upper-class curtain separating young Grady McNeil from the rest of the universe. Grady is only 17, but she’s advanced for her years—considering, after all, that this is 1947 or thereabouts, so soon after the war that her parents feel compelled to sail to their home in Cannes to make sure it’s still there. “And shop; of course we’ll shop,” adds her mother, very much to the palace born and with her priorities firmly in place. Grady wishes to sit this trip out: She has discovered the wonders of Broadway and its “pearl-eyed perfumed Negroes, those men, silk- or sailor-shirted, toughs or pale-toothed and lavender-suited, those men that watched, smiled, followed.” And though vaguely engaged to an upper-class twit who turns out to be not so bad, Grady is now sleeping with a war veteran who—she is very surprised to learn—is Jewish. Clyde Manzer is all business, a kind of Stanley Kowalski without the table manners; he likes Grady, but not much. Suffice it to say here that their romance ends badly—in fact, on a note out of Reefer Madness.

A wonderful discovery for the scholars, who will find Capote in possession, in his early 20s, of a confident voice and fine storytelling skills. But Capote is for readers, and here they will find a pleasing—if surely dated—entertainment.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-6522-4

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EARLY STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE
by Truman Capote

- BOOK REVIEW
PORTRAITS AND OBSERVATIONS
by Truman Capote

- BOOK REVIEW
TOO BRIEF A TREAT
by Truman Capote & edited by Gerald Clarke

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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
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.