A brilliant must-read from Martin (The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, 2006, etc.), who captures the zeitgeist of...
What seems at first a tightly focused domestic drama about a middle-aged couple’s reaction to their son’s new girlfriend broadens onto a large socio-political canvas as liberal values run smack into fear of foreign invasiveness.
Chloe, an illustrator working on an edition of Wuthering Heights, and her history professor husband, Brendan, researching a book about the Crusades, live in a comfortably rural setting outside Manhattan. The two are typically self-satisfied, self-aware members of the left-leaning bourgeoisie. Chloe in particular prides herself on her open-mindedness, but she is immediately put off when only son Toby, a junior at NYU, introduces his exotic new girlfriend Salome, with whom he is clearly besotted. Salome, a scholarship student who immigrated to Louisiana with her father and brother after her mother and other brother were killed in Croatia, strikes Chloe as judgmental and possibly predatory. More sanguine, Brendan recognizes with nostalgia the sexual frisson between Salome and Toby. Chloe’s unease rises when Toby and Salome start living together. Salome becomes pregnant; she and Toby decide to marry; and all Chloe’s alarms go off. At the same time, she feels increasingly threatened by a foreign trespasser who has been shooting rabbits on her land and may or may not have committed several other invasive, violent acts. With Iraq an ever-present backdrop, Martin builds a discomforting sense of menace: Is Chloe paranoid or is the threat real? Even Toby fights his doubts about Salome, especially when she disappears the day after their marriage. She’s gone to Trieste to find her mother, who is not dead after all—she tells her story in italicized fragments throughout the novel. Toby soon follows Salome. After Chloe sends Brendan to intervene, her worst fears are realized, however inadvertently, at home and abroad.
A brilliant must-read from Martin (The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, 2006, etc.), who captures the zeitgeist of contemporary America within a deeply personal context.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51545-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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