An overly schematic novel about suffering, trauma, and the possibility of healing that works best in its moments of quiet,...
Yitzhak Goldah arrives in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947 with a hat, a small suitcase, and the suit on his back, like “a sail still holding its shape even after the wind has died away.”
Goldah, a Czech Jew, is 31 years old; he has just survived two and a half years in concentration camps. Now the war has ended, and his cousins, Abe and Pearl Jesler, have sponsored his immigration to the American South. From the moment of his arrival, Goldah is struck by a series of hypocrisies. First there is the sodden pity directed at him by the Jeslers and their wealthy friends, who pant for information about what he’s “been through” even as they squirm before the truth. Then there is the odd rivalry between Savannah’s Conservative and Reform Jews, a division that may seem trivial to Goldah but which affects him all the same. It isn’t long before Goldah, who has landed with the Conservative Jeslers, finds himself attracted to a beautiful Reform widow named Eva, drawing frowns of disapproval from both sides. Finally, there is the systematic oppression of black people, which Savannah’s Jews participate in even as they are learning the extent of the devastation wreaked by the Holocaust. As Calvin, a black man who works for Abe, tells Goldah: “They tried to kill you, all a you, all at once. I seen that. But here they kill us one at a time and that’s a difference.” This is a lot for one slim novel to pack in, but Rabb, author of a trilogy of historical thrillers, packs in more. As it turns out, Abe, a shoe salesman, has involved himself in some illegal import business and is in over his head. Then a mysterious woman appears: Goldah, it seems, had once been engaged, and the fiancee he had presumed dead is alive. It’s at this point that the novel starts to break down. Rabb is an accomplished storyteller with an eye for telling detail and for dialogue. The novel proceeds at a fast clip. But he’s jammed in too much. The plot feels overly determined, burdened by the historical parallels Rabb is everywhere eager to draw. His desire to wrap up all these narrative lines seems too neat and tidy, too like a gift box tightly wrapped in string.
An overly schematic novel about suffering, trauma, and the possibility of healing that works best in its moments of quiet, spare description.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-803-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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