Phillips proves yet again that she is an intuitive, emotionally resonant writer who is willing to consider some of life’s...
The short stories in this darkly absorbing collection remind us of the hope and humanity, the warmth, joy, and love that can be found in even the bleakest circumstances.
One of the many remarkable things about Phillips’ fiction is that, even as she conjures unsettlingly grim dystopian futures, which seem to be an unfortunate extension of today’s urban reality, or fixes her focus on untidy aspects of the here and now, she reveals something essential, enduring, and glitteringly beautiful about our most personal relationships: the ways our families (our husbands and wives; our children) can offer us comfort and safety, humanity, and love in a cold, uncaring world. She did it in her debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), and she does it again in several of the 18 stories in this darkly delicious collection. In “The Knowers,” a story that is especially redolent of Phillips’ novel, a woman opts, over her husband’s objection, to learn the precise date of her own death: “April 17, 2043,” the character muses. “The knowledge heightened my life. The knowledge burdened my life. I regretted knowing. I was grateful to know.” “The Doppelgängers” captures the terrifying wonders of first-time motherhood—the ways it reroutes a woman's loyalties and fundamentally redefines her. In “Contamination Generation,” Phillips brings us a couple trying to raise their 5-year-old daughter with a sense of nature’s joy and wonder in a cement-hard city landscape, a world in which only the wealthy—like the rich family next door—have private lawns and in which the “grass for the masses” at the city’s botanic gardens (reached via two buses and the subway) may be gazed at but not walked, sat, lain, or played upon. This young family may not have a lush, air-purified backyard with a swimming pool, like their neighbors, but their shared love, the delight they take in each other’s company, and the thoughtful things they do to help one another muddle through make them rich indeed. Phillips’ sneakily optimistic stories are all about finding hope in even the bleakest situations. “The thing is, the organism survives no matter what,” the dad who narrates “Contamination Generation” observes; “the organism even thrives.”
Phillips proves yet again that she is an intuitive, emotionally resonant writer who is willing to consider some of life’s biggest questions and offer, yes, a few possible solutions.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-379-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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