A darkly comic, thought-provoking, well-told story.
In this literary novel, a psychiatrist spends his 75th birthday dealing with the final details before his planned suicide.
The prolific Appel (The Liars’ Asylum, 2017, etc.) often begins his stories with a bang, and his latest book’s opening sentence is no exception: “On the day he was to hang himself, Millard Salter made his bed for the first time in fifty-seven years.” Although he’s not disappointed, unhappy, or ill, is still working as a psychiatrist, and has launched most of his children well in life, Millard hopes to avoid dying “dependent or diminished.” He’s in love with Delilah, 62, a severely ill woman whom he’s agreed to help die on this day, also his 75th birthday. He looks back on his long career when he stops by his office; reminisces about his family and two marriages as he visits his ex-wife Carol’s apartment and second wife Isabelle’s grave; and lunches with his youngest son, a 43-year-old layabout who doesn’t mention his father’s birthday. Millard’s plans are rationally thought out, but the irrational keeps erupting during his day: a lynx cub gets loose in the hospital; an explosion blasts the post office near his lunch meeting; a usurper has been buried in the psychiatrist’s spot next to Isabelle. (A fix is promised; “I’ll be back tomorrow to check,” says Millard in a secret joke.) A warmhearted surprise also awaits Millard, but whether any of this will distract him from his intent will be disclosed only in the final line. A physician, attorney, and bioethicist, Appel brings well-informed thoughtfulness, as always, to this work. There’s an excellent case to be made for Millard’s continued engagement in the world, and the author clearly presents it in all fairness. Equally, though, he deftly makes a case for letting go: of expectations for one’s children, of plans for tomorrow, of freedom from worry. Appel’s preoccupation with secrecy and helpful or seductive fictions enrich the tale, too, as with the cab driver whose master’s thesis involves getting men to pretend they know about nonexistent things.
A darkly comic, thought-provoking, well-told story.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5072-0408-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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