Five short stories and a novella by the author of Duplicate Keys (1984) and At Paradise Gate (1981), all celebrating, in one way or another, what Smiley in the novella dubs "The Age of Grief"—that time in middle age, "after all that schooling, all that care," when coming around to you is "the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from." The protagonist here is a 35-year-old dentist, a husband and professional partner of a dramatically achieving wife, a father of three young daughters, and a contented tinkerer with "tiny machines, itsy bitsy pieces of cotton"—small things for a small life? He enters the Age of Grief when he becomes aware that his wife has a lover, and the future he'd always counted on "walking into" drops away. He probes the ties and trivia of family, and his own unexamined psycho-physical being, which erratically transmits grief and rage, and he confronts mortality in the terrifying illness of a child. As for marriage, it is "a small container" that two "inner lives" can burst or deform. The short stories, meanwhile, evolve some sad little truths. A cherished frienship with a married couple upends as careless exploitation. In "Lily," another hapless, unwitting intruder in a marriage pays a price. A reluctant visitor to his brother's Christmas celebration comes to recognize, in the failure' and fading of a long-distance love affair, his own "permanent smallness." Even a maker of bombs for a radical group admits—now that she's quit—that looking at the other side of the "firm shape of my life" reveals motives "trival, unimportant." "Jeffrey, Believe Me" is an amusing burlesque, poking fun at the female-seducer stereotype—here it's very hard work indeed, all for a swim in the gene pool. Smiley writes with a sound emotive control that shapes into firm tone and meaning the widely browsing meditations of her characters. And there is that memorable and sobering perspective—when vision changes from the far distance to the near reality of a life suddenly grown shriveled and, alas, permanently small.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1987
ISBN: 0385721870
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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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