For anyone interested in reading a real review of "Night Film", I submit the following:
Underground Idol NYT Sunday Book Review
By Joe Hill
The true believers come out at night. They meet in condemned buildings marked by the symbol of a stylized eye to watch a “night film” — one of the psychologically punishing horror pictures of Stanislas Cordova, a master filmmaker who has shunned publicity with a zeal that makes Thomas Pynchon look like a shameless attention hog. Adding to the mystique is a sense that Cordova might have retreated because he has something unsavory to hide. Bad things happen to those who try to pick his locked closet for a look at the skeletons. Consider the star reporter Scott McGrath, who plunged into disgrace after a preliminary investigation into Cordova’s secrets blew up in his face. McGrath has a score to settle, so when Cordova’s achingly gifted daughter turns up dead in a Manhattan ruin, it’s Take 2 for the unemployed journalist. Nor is McGrath the only one who wants to know what’s been going on behind the camera; in short order he’s joined by a shabby but smoldering drug dealer named Hopper and a breathless ingénue, Nora Halliday. Together, the three make an adorably awkward family of misfits, who will be even more appealing should George Clooney, Ryan Gosling and Alison Brie be cast for the movie adaptation.
NIGHT FILM
Marisha Pessl
602 pp. Random House. $28.
No one can accuse Marisha Pessl of unfamiliarity with the tools of the modern thriller. With pages of faked-up old photos, invented Web sites and satellite maps, “Night Film” — Pessl’s second novel, following “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” (2006) — asserts itself as a multimedia presentation more than an old-fashioned book. There are over a hundred chapters, most of the James Patterson two-page variety, a technique that adds a giddy accelerant to Pessl’s already zippy pacing. She also italicizes two or three sentences a page, an insecure tic like a child poking you in the ribs to ask if you’re paying attention. Unfortunately, all those italics serve to draw the reader’s notice to exactly the wrong sort of lines, clunkers like “It was too quiet” and “Had I just sealed myself inside my own coffin?” Pessl is capable of fine prose, so her willingness to serve up “Hardy Boys” nuggets like these suggests she’s willfully dumbing herself down. Still and all, “Night Film” has been precision-engineered to be read at high velocity, and its energy would be the envy of any summer blockbuster. Your average writer of thrillers should lust for Pessl’s deft touch with character. Here’s McGrath on his ex-wife:
“When I met Cynthia our sophomore year at the University of Michigan, she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.”
Cordova himself — a dark riff on Kubrick, with a pinch of Friedkin and a sprig of Banksy thrown in for good measure — stays offstage, casting his long, creepy shadow across the actors throughout the course of the drama. Pessl would like “Night Film” to work as a meditation on the question of whether one must be a monster to effectively portray the monstrous in art (quick real-world answer: no). But her conception of the monstrous is sweetly innocent. The book leaps from bondage clubs to mental hospitals to witchcraft supply stores, as if evil were more a matter of setting than a person’s actions. To be fair, the witchcraft emporium — which turns out to be like a voodoo Apple store, right down to the Genius Bar in back — is an exquisitely charming side trip. But the evil-as-scenery tactic grows wearisome in the novel’s central set piece, when the heroes break into Cordova’s sprawling compound in a scene that lasts almost 50 pages and feels at least twice that. In the first two-thirds of the book, Pessl captures the feel of one of Kubrick’s compact, relentless chillers, but during this not-quite-climactic climax, “Night Film” begins to feel more like one of his glacially paced statements — “Eyes Wide Shut,” without the redeeming value of celebrity nudity.
For all we get about Cordova and his films (the story lines, memorable characters, favorite motifs and symbols, casts, costumes, everything except what there was to eat at the craft service table), the story isn’t really about him at all but about his daughter, Ashley, an equally larger-than-life figure, matter to his antimatter. “Did she fall or was she pushed” is maybe a less intellectual concern than what a work of art reveals about the artist, but it serves Pessl better. Ashley Cordova at least feels like a person, whereas her father feels more like the world’s most sinister IMDb entry. She’s busy, anyway: she records a virtuoso piano performance at 14, lights a man on fire, escapes a mental ward and has more than a little of the devil in her. (This last is not necessarily a metaphorical statement.) I’m not sure the reader ever becomes fully invested in her either, but no matter. Piecing together the events of Ashley’s last days keeps the heroes moving and in constant contact with a personality that does connect: Manhattan itself, in her best-looking summer dress. In a book of colorful settings, this is a backdrop that refuses to drop back. Pessl’s renderings of Chinese grocery stores, tattoo boutiques and the dog run in Washington Square Park are bound to remind readers of the grungy thrills of a whole different director: Martin Scorsese. Cue the Rolling Stones.
More crucially, the mystery of Ashley’s death gives the heroes plenty of opportunities to leap into trouble, fast-talk their way out of it and gradually wake to the realization that they love one another. Pessl is at her best here, when she’s least ambitious and her focus is pinned to her three amateur detectives as they negotiate the unmapped terrain of affection and trust in sweet, breezy dialogue: “I told you. I love you. And not as a friend or a boss, but real love. I’ve known it for 24 hours,” Nora tells McGrath, who responds, “Sounds like a stomach bug that will pass.”
In simple, unadorned moments like these, when her heroes seem at least as interested in one another as in a dead girl or absent auteur, “Night Film” settles into the relaxed rhythms of a Ross Macdonald mystery, with a dirt and hunger and guileless laughter that are all Pessl’s own.
"/>Joe Hill is the author of several novels, including “NOS4A2,” and a comic book series, “Locke & Key.”
