DeYoung’s engrossing conclusion and exquisite tone make wading through the extraneous passages worth the effort.
Oxford Ph.D. DeYoung’s debut novel about an extended family’s summer at the Maine shore in 1928 captures the mood and morals of a bygone era but intermittently stalls in the telling.
Thirteen-year-old Richard Killing II’s retrospective account of a family gathering at Shorecliff, his mother’s old family home, is filled with longing, love and regret as he remembers a fateful summer in a house filled with relatives. Richard is the youngest of 11 cousins, an only child who longs to join in the easy camaraderie that exists among the others, but he often feels invisible because of his youth and awkwardness. Thrilled to be spending the summer with them—a period of time that some of the older cousins resent, as they’re dragged away from their friends and other activities at home—Richard and his mother travel to Shorecliff, where he takes up residence in a small attic room. His father, a dour, judgmental attorney, doesn’t accompany them, much to Richard’s relief, although he shows up for a few days later in the summer. Richard’s happy to spend time with his Uncle Kurt and cousin Pamela, who’s only a bit older than he, but he desperately wants to be noticed and accepted by the older cousins. They recognize that Richard has a valuable—if dubious—skill: He eavesdrops on conversations. And it’s not too difficult to get him to spill the beans since, in those moments, he gets to bask in the spotlight. Richard not only snoops on his uncles and aunts, he also observes and mentally records his cousins’ activities: Tom, the golden boy, becomes besotted with a local girl; beautiful, spirited Francesca enlists malleable Charlie to become part of her rebellious escapades; Delia and Cordelia (the Delias) plot to release a tamed fox into the wild. As the summer wears on, Richard’s narration sometimes becomes mired in too much detail, but he always manages to get back to the heart of his affecting story. Some of his revelations seem innocent enough, but others are bombshells that change the dynamics of the family, shift individual perspectives and serve as catalysts for the events that follow.
DeYoung’s engrossing conclusion and exquisite tone make wading through the extraneous passages worth the effort.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-21339-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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