Unsatisfying as a novel, but the observations are piquant enough to make for an enjoyable read.
Part novel, part cultural travelogue, this latest from the British critic and novelist (The Ongoing Moment, 2005, etc.) consists of two sections, linked by the narrator’s sensibility.
Jeff Atman is on his way to Venice. The 45-year-old Londoner, a freelance journalist, has been assigned to cover the 2003 Biennale for an arts magazine. Narrator Jeff is not a big player in the art world, though he’s a familiar face on the circuit as he pursues his favorite things: drinking, drugs, parties and hitting on younger women (he’s divorced). The Biennale provides “magical excess.” The parties are nonstop; the bellinis flow and the cocaine glistens. At his first party Jeff meets the absolutely must-have girl. Laura Freeman, early 30s, is about to quit her gallery job in Los Angeles to do a grand tour of the East, including Varanasi (Benares). It’s not long before they’re having terrific sex and strolling the streets like lovers. Dyer’s dialogue is dead-on, but Laura doesn’t have much of a personality. It’s not all sex and parties though. Jeff comments provocatively on the city and the artwork before the lovers part, promising to e-mail. Then we’re launched into the second, less novelistic, section. Jeff’s latest assignment has brought him to, you guessed it, Varanasi. This holiest of Indian cities is the main character here. Jeff deals with the traffic and the unending demands for rupees as he explores the temples and the funeral pyres by the Ganges. But what about Laura? Gone with the wind, evidently, for she’s never mentioned again, a disappointment for readers expecting continuity. Jeff enjoys his new life of idleness, going native, wearing a loincloth and bathing in the Ganges. A more conventional treatment would signal a midlife crisis and breakdown. Instead, with playful nonchalance, Jeff fades slowly from view, like the Cheshire Cat.
Unsatisfying as a novel, but the observations are piquant enough to make for an enjoyable read.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37737-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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