Boyne’s singular villain and well-sustained tension merit a good audience.
An all-consuming ambition to be a successful writer drives a young man down unusual paths to literary acclaim in this compelling character study.
Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, 2017, etc.) opens his 11th novel for adults with novelist Erich Ackermann, 66, telling how he was beguiled by the handsome young would-be writer Maurice Swift, at whose urging Ackermann reveals his early life in Nazi Germany and a terrible secret. The revelations become Swift’s successful first novel, and Ackermann’s career collapses as the young man stokes media attention by disclosing his source. Cut to the Amalfi Coast home of Gore Vidal and a third-person narrator describing Swift’s visit with a different older gay writer. Vidal has some good sharp-edged lines as he concedes that the young man is well-read and a good writer, but he also finds him cruelly abusive to his latest mentor. What Vidal doesn’t perceive is Swift’s one glaring, possibly implausible shortcoming: He has no imagination for fiction, no good original ideas for a story. The tension rises as Boyne plays on the question of how far Swift will go for a winning idea. He is married in the next section, his second novel has flopped, and four more unassisted efforts were all rejected. Meanwhile his wife’s fictional debut is well-received, and she feels her second novel will be even better. This leads to a chilling confrontation, made all the more so as Boyne reveals why the wife’s narration addresses Swift as “you.” Other horrors lie ahead. The question of comeuppance is long left unanswered. Boyne lightens the book’s deep shadows and amorality with amusing jabs at the fame game behind literary life, with its blurbs and prizes, acolytes and endless envy.
Boyne’s singular villain and well-sustained tension merit a good audience.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2301-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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