Former standup comic Landvik debuts with a homespun beauty- parlor melodrama, Minneapolis-set. Patty Jane is 21 when she marries Thor, an impossibly handsome architect-in-training. Impregnated on their wedding night, she feels her husband growing painfully distant as her girth increases. After a fight, Thor disappears for good. Disconsolate Patty Jane is tended by her sister Harriet, who's madly in love with Avel, pint- sized heir to a cereal fortune. Then Avel is killed in a plane crash. Cut forward a decade. Patty Jane is now the proprietor of the House of Curl, a needlepoint-appointed beauty parlor where a gang of salt-of-the-earth locals with names like Inky and Crabby gathers for restorative good-ol'-gal group therapy. Harriet plays her harp; Thor's mother bakes; handsome Clyde Chuka does manicures. Patty Jane even introduces a House of Curl lecture series, in which the girls hold forth on their obsessions: Decorating with Fabrics, Legends of Hollywood. But then Harriet starts to drink. She walks out on home and harp, and soon is panhandling, turning tricks, and vomiting in dumpsters. Meanwhile, Patty Jane, missing her sister, falls into Clyde Chuka's arms. Later, a recovering alcoholic cop named Reese befriends down-and-out Harriet and lures her to A.A.; she slowly works at being sober, then rejoins her family, Reese in tow. One day, though, Harriet spots a familiar-looking zombie: Thor, brain-damaged on the night of his long-ago fight with Patty Jane, has been kept prisoner by a crazy former oral surgeon. He's rescued and welcomed back into the House of Curl circle. But then Harriet is diagnosed with lung cancer, and the gang gathers for a teary deathbed scene beforeguess what?bounding spunkily back. Though the elaborately crafted wackiness and cloying coziness of the beauty-parlor scene will annoy some, readers hungry for an easy-to-swallow tale of female—not feminist—solidarity may find this a satisfying, sugary treat.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-882593-12-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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