Best for those who consider Barth an essential contemporary writer—whose numbers may be, well, “contracting.”
The storytelling urge, in old age and under duress, as seen in the veteran postmodernist’s latest collection.
The framework of these variously related tales consists of ongoing playfully erotic conversations (and conjoinings) shared by an aging writer (“Graybard”) and his lissome body-painted “Muse,” rather archly named WYSIWYG (meaning “What you see is what you get”). The setting is (Barth’s usual) Maryland’s Eastern shore, during the 11 days that follow the bombing of the World Trade Center. Graybard wonders whether stories still matter in a world so ruthlessly destructive. And WYSIWYG affably deconstructs and disses the “Hendecameron” (so named in homage to Boccaccio) he nevertheless assembles, rudely questioning his metafictional toying with variant versions of “a non-story that becomes a Story by acknowledging that it isn’t one.” Undeterred, Graybard offers “stories” about narrative possibility (inspired by a recovered wedding ring, the near-convergence of a cat struck and killed by a car and a missing autistic boy found in a remote marshland). Noodling about writers’ dreams (“A Detective and a Turtle”) and the notion that both the physical universe and human possibility are contracting (“The Big Shrink,” “Extension”) yield mixed results—as do “9999,” in which confluences of numbers have possibly “causative” characteristics, and “Click,” which laboriously riffs on contrasts and linkages between virtual and “real” reality. Barth (Coming Soon!!!, 2001, etc.) does better with a sly science-fiction premise in “The Rest of Your Life,” and a retired teacher’s intuition that the declining birth rate presages a rejection of human “continuity” in “And Then There’s the One.” But the volume relapses into coy self-reflexiveness, and the reader nods. Barth’s conviction that characters and plots, beginnings and endings aren’t stories’ central concerns becomes, once again, initially stimulating, increasingly puzzling, ultimately dissatisfying.
Best for those who consider Barth an essential contemporary writer—whose numbers may be, well, “contracting.”Pub Date: April 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-40566-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
IN THE NEWS
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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