{"id":115,"date":"2009-05-21T16:46:52","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T16:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.wordpress.com\/?p=115"},"modified":"2009-05-21T16:46:52","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T16:46:52","slug":"review-of-j-robert-lennons-castle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/05\/21\/review-of-j-robert-lennons-castle\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of J. Robert Lennon's "Castle""},"content":{"rendered":"

The following review appeared in the Dallas Morning News, 5 April 2009. The first half of the book is compelling and odd: You know something is up, but aren’t quite sure what it is and or what to foresee coming next. I wasn’t thrilled with the ending but it did make the eerie set-up relevant to the here and now: At first the story and style seemed in the spirit of 19th century American Romantics, like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” The House of the Seven Gables<\/em>, or Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Right now I’m reviewing Marcel Theroux’s Far North<\/em>, another post-apocalyptic novel for these gloomy days of The Great Recession.
\n\u00a0
\nCASTLE\/By J. Robert Lennon\/Graywolf; 228 pages, $22
\nSelf-Portrait of Guilt
\nFilmmakers have been quick to seize on the Iraq War as rich material: for instance, last year\u2019s \u201cIn the Valley of Elah\u201d features Tommy Lee Jones\u2019s knockout performance as a military father struggling with his son\u2019s death. But the most notable books so far have been nonfiction, a good example being Rajiv Chandrasekaran\u2019s \u201cImperial Life in the Emerald City.\u201d It\u2019s only natural that now novels will attempt to portray this chaotic moment in history, but few will tackle that task with the complexity and eeriness of J. Robert Lennon\u2019s fourth novel, \u201cCastle.\u201d
\nConstructed like a Chinese box, Lennon nestles story-within-story to mimic the ultimate reality of a labyrinthine Iraqi military interrogation center. At first the novel seems a quaint, neo-Gothic tale of a na\u00efve homebuyer taking possession of a dilapidated fixer-upper in New York State, echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe: There\u2019s a preternaturally gloomy forest, an eldritch outcropping of rock, and ultimately, a small-scale castle with a mysterious owner: \u201cIn spite of the brilliance of the day, and of the trees\u2019 nascent foliage, I was instantly enveloped in gloom\u201d (68).
\nIn the classic tradition of the unreliable narrator, it quickly becomes apparent that all is not well with the \u201cI.\u201d He seems to have fled some calamity in his life, but makes little mention of it, and when others do, such as his sister, he reacts with paranoia and hostility. His new home has an expanse of land into which he descends, literally and figuratively. Here he encounters a white deer that leads him to the castle, and pursues an elusive forest man with ties to his own past.
\nHere the novel veers wildly toward the psychological thriller. The owner of the castle appears to be one Dr. Avery Stiles, a disgraced professor of psychology from a nearby SUNY campus. The spooky tone reminiscent of early American Gothic literature vanishes. While the reader becomes a subject of mind games redolent of B.F. Skinner behavior modification experiments, cryptic clues about the suicide-murder of the narrator\u2019s mother and father plop out of the closet. The narrator then reveals his father\u2019s complicity in Dr. Stiles cruel experiments on himself as a boy.
\nLastly what may be the narrator\u2019s \u2018true identity\u2019 emerges, although in this hall of mirrors, it\u2019s impossible to recognize which reflection is real: Without giving too much away, there\u2019s a fictionalized Abu Ghraib prison scenario, in which the narrator plays a crucial role, and what seems to effect his return to the demented \u2018castle\u2019 of his youth. Lennon pulls off a virtuoso performance with this convoluted structure, and like the best thrillers, you can\u2019t put it down. Clever and insightful, it compels the reader to solve a series of riddles that reveal the emotional rationale underpinning our most despicable behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following review appeared in the Dallas Morning News, 5 April 2009. The first half of the book is compelling and odd: You know something is up, but aren’t quite sure what it is and or what to foresee coming … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}