Literary Significance and Reception
Light House intentionally references the satirical novels of the early 19th-century British author and satirist Thomas Love Peacock, such as Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey. Peacock's novels have little plot and are best known for parodying the intellectual modes and pretenses of his contemporaries; his characters normally assemble in characteristic English country houses and predominantly engage in conversation. Nightmare Abbey satirized the English romantic movement and included characters based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
When Light House was published in 2000 it was critically acclaimed, however, it had lackluster sales. William Georgiades, in a review for The New York Times, called it "a sort of old English farce that allows Monahan to skewer whatever comes to mind: modern art, magazine writing, education, the young". The Chicago Sun-Times construed the storyline as one that "allows Monahan to indulge in wisecracks, lampoons and slurs of seemingly infinite variety" with "literary and artistic pretenders heavy fire". Mark Rozzo of the Los Angeles Times praised Monahan's "refreshing disregard for believability, making Light House — which contains asides on Freud, Emerson, race and fiction itself — a seriously adult cartoon".
BookPage Fiction's Bruce Tierney called Monahan "a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis" and Alfred Alcorn of the Boston Herald detected "delightful echoes of Vladimir Nabokov, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Flann O'Brien and other modern masters of drollery" in the novel, concluding that "n the end, the girl gets the girl, the bad guys lose, and an old Yankee blows himself up with the eponymous lighthouse and a few chunks of the Virginia Woolf legacy".
After describing the women in Light House as "mainly vehicles for sex" and the men as "mostly hapless", The Boston Globe's Jules Verdone generalized that the entire cast of characters appeared to be created "simply so that can skewer them", allowing that "it makes for a pretty good spectator sport".
Read more about this topic: Light House: A Trifle
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)