The film noir version of growing up female.
In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very
contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family,
and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny,
disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman
writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of
private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America
makes and unmakes a young woman.
"In Haunted Houses, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood
and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic
chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually
self-absorbed parents. . . . Her style is spare and compelling, the
effect of clinical authenticity."--New York Times Book Review
"Ms. Tillman's characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard
for the truth of their inner lives . . . this is one of the most
interesting works of fiction in recent times . . . Fans of both truth
and fancy should find nourishment here."--LA Weekly
"Lynne Tillman's protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible,
one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of
her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and
headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things:
a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent
fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight."--Dennis Cooper
"This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate
storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York,
maturing in a world of baffling freedoms and uncertainties.... Childhood
fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the
uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with
intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for
comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about
life as it is, not as we might wish it to be."--Sunday Times
"Lynne Tillman's writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable,
and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear
and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and
exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring... To read her is,
in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her
work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive
today."--John Zorn
"Lynne Tillman's haunted houses are Freudian ones -- the psyches of
three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the
psychological 'ghosts' that shape them . . . . Frequently shifting
points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a
modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains
controlled."--Lucy Atkins, Times Literary Supplement
