Smooth but lukewarm reflections on the search for passion.
A bittersweet update of Love Actually scoops up the married, the single, the adults and the children in a swirling, interconnected, not-especially-incisive survey of the search for true connection.
British screenwriter Nicholson, who scripted Gladiator, revisits eight years later some of the characters from his previous novel (The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, 2010) to find a shaky marriage; a predatory parent; several young adults, variously innocent or experienced; and other more or less yearning individuals linked to a comfortable corner of the English landscape just before Christmas. Mature-but-sexy Belinda Redknapp is horrified to discover her balding plastic surgeon husband Tom is having an affair. Belinda’s daughter Chloe tries to match-make a romance between fellow students Alice and Jack, later becoming ensnared herself by Alice’s unreliable father Guy. Laura, Jack’s mother, is called on to help her sister Diana, whose husband Roddy has stopped talking, while Alice’s step-aunt Meg meets a plumber with a secret life. And so it goes, a spiral of expectations, disappointments and aphorisms drawn from encounters in life and love. Some find happiness, some must reconsider what they have, others can’t or won’t commit. Nichols adds flashes of intensity and wisdom to the cozy mix but several characters tend towards caricature and there are shortages of originality and grit.
Smooth but lukewarm reflections on the search for passion.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-954-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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 The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive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
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.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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