Allen Stanley encounters the seamy underside of suburbia when he returns to his old neighborhood to arrange funeral details after his father's suicide, finding strange sexual tensions, suggestions of murder, and family skeletons. A first novel. 12,500 first printing.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Depicting suburbia as a split-level hell, first-novelist Rayfiel offers narrative sound bites that mix crime, coyness and sociological criticism. At about age 30, Allen Stanley returns to the childhood home from which his older sister vanished nearly 20 years before, where his grief-stricken mother died in an accident a few years later and where his father has just been found dead in the bathtub, his wrists slashed. The story is advanced by schizophrenic conversations, often sexually driven, that Allen carries on with the boy who cuts his father's lawn, with the promiscuous, hard-drinking woman across the street and with the teenage girl he meets in the library. When not waxing existential, Allen fitfully pursues rumors afloat in the unnamed community that link his father to the disappearance of his sister and of young girls seen in dimly lit bedrooms of the house. Allen's tentative investigation occurs in brutally truncated scenes and with dialogue that turns gothically arch between breaths. Rayfiel picks up convention towards the end and delivers a watertight solution that ties up his thematic and dramatic threads. But it's a classic instance of too little too late.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Who killed David Stanley? A retired professor and widower, father of a daughter who disappeared at age 15 and a son who left for college and never came back, Stanley was found in the bathtub of his split-level suburban home with his wrists cut. But there are suspicious bruises on his wrists, initials written in blood on the bathroom ceiling, no razor blade to be found, and those old rumors about Stanley's sexual proclivities. When Allen Stanley returns to bury his father, he becomes the target of circumstantial evidence and the instrument for revealing long-buried secrets. Screenwriter Rayfiel's first novel will appeal especially to Twin Peaks fans and film buffs for its quirky contemporary surrealism and cinematic style; it's a deft handling of the dark side of human nature, without a stock character in sight. Recommended.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L. , Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L. , Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Split Levels - an opinion,
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This review is from: SPLIT LEVELS (Hardcover)
Well, this was a easy quick read. It was enoyable, but overall it was rather unbelievable. It's hard to imagine anyone is as wacky as the characters in this book. But maybe Allen Stanley is completely delusional, and since the story is told from his point-of-view we see his warped version of reality only. I recommend it, if you are looking for a one-sitting read without commitment.
4.0 out of 5 stars
sex, sin, suburbs and anomie,
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This review is from: SPLIT LEVELS (Hardcover)
A man returns to the suburban development where he was raised, following the apparent suicide of his father. His sister had disappeared mysteriously many years previously. He finds himself suspected of his father's murder, and that his father has been a supected child molester. Much (too much) is made of the anonymity of suburban developments, and as part of this the hero remains an enigmatic character and the geographical location is uncertain. The opening is intriguing but then some of the dialog and characterization is in that surrealistic 1960's style of Gass,Pynchon,Barth and Delillo, with puzzling motivation, dream sequences, and unconvincingly eccentric characters. I was afraid it was going to be one of those pretentious incoherent Kafkaesque things but it tightens up into an intriguing and well-plotted mystery. A lot of sex of every variety, although never very explicit.
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