Scott’s luminous prose, references to world events and hints of magical realism never quite coalesce, but Sally is a...
Scott (Everybody Loves Somebody, 2006, etc.) follows the life journey of an impoverished farm girl who repeatedly reinvents herself as she moves from town to town in northern Pennsylvania.
In 1947, 16-year-old Sally Werner, the daughter of German immigrants, is seduced and impregnated by a cousin. Leaving behind her newborn son, she runs away and begins a new life in a small community along the Tuskee River. But when someone from home recognizes her, Sally panics. She steals cash from her kindly employer and runs further north to a new town where she calls herself Sally Angel. She falls in love with a teenager named Mole who makes her genuinely happy until local rich boy Benny carelessly runs Mole’s car off the road. Unaware of his role in Mole’s death, grief-stricken Sally has a brief affair with Benny before she senses his mean streak. She runs again although she soon realizes she is carrying Benny’s baby. As Sally Mole she finds friendship, a good job and a satisfying life with her daughter Penelope in the town of Tuskee until Benny finds her and beats her up. Correctly fearing that he’ll attempt to take her daughter away, Sally runs with Penelope to Rondo where as Sally Bliss she raises Penelope while working as a legal secretary and carrying on a romance with her married boss. Sally’s story is narrated by her granddaughter, who is also tracing her own parental history. Penelope never knew why her fiancé Abe disappeared before the narrator’s birth, although early on the narrator drops the bombshell—Abe left when Sally told him he was her long-lost son. The romantic tragedy is that Sally was mistaken. The novel begins to peter out when Abe initiates contact with the narrator to give her the facts. Abe’s story is just not as interesting as Sally’s.
Scott’s luminous prose, references to world events and hints of magical realism never quite coalesce, but Sally is a character of mythic proportions.Pub Date: April 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-05165-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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