Rating: 
Summary: Maybe its me...
Review: ...but it seems Mr. Carroll's recent efforts have declined. I have been eagerly reading each new work since I came across Bones of the Moon years ago, but have found little to enthrall me recently. His cool monikering of characters continues (Anjo? King of the Park? Love it!) but his ability to make us care for these characters has diminished. There is a scene late in the book where the protagonists' son says what a great dad he has, despite the philandering, and prolonged absences throughout his life. I am not being moralistic here, but if I don't like and respect the character at this point in the book, some feeble accolades from a minor character are not likely to motivate me. As usual the plot is intriguing, but there are some laughable moments of absurd romanticism (my eef? My God!!). Want a great read? Try Leif Enger's Peace Like a River. Remarkable.
Rating: 
Summary: Tiles in the Mosaic
Review: After hearing about Jonathan Carroll's work I decided to give him a try, starting with White Apples. What lay within the pages was a haunting tale of life, death, and after life commingled with some very intriguing ideas on the universe.
If you're a fan of weird fiction check out Carroll because he is indeed a magician, pockets bulging with tricks, mesmerizing and entertaining. He slowly pulls you along and then, WHAM, he turns it on, full throttle intensity of the highest order. All the while retaining an amazing amount of literary integrity; it's as if Twain, Poe, and Dahl were mixing up a tale during an all night peyote session.
"Chaos is not your friend."
Rating: 
Summary: Carroll's latest is one of Carroll's best.
Review: Carroll creatively appropriates the Orpheus/Eurydice myth with a twist in this new novel -- a woman returns to the land of the dead to retrieve her husband and the father of her child. Carroll's descriptions of living death -- of the experience of death itself -- is as haunting as the story itself is touchingly humane. It's ultimately a love story, a love story that makes a very real, human, even flawed love shared by real, human, flawed characters a love that's stronger than death or the impulse to control. In this novel, like others, Carroll stretches our conceptions of reality so that we can properly see the mundane.
Rating: 
Summary: what happened to jonathan carroll?
Review: Carroll used to be one of my favourite authors. I remember waiting for his next novel as one who waits for a miracle. I remember cherising his work like few other author's. And then, after "from the teeth of angels" Carroll seemed to wander away into increasingly new-agey tales without semi-decent plots, with characters that felt like re-heated leftovers from earlier novels... White Apples is the last and, for me, worst step in this painful decline. I guess all writers have these lapses, or maybe there's a point beyond which the goods just don't come anymore. For me JC will always be a great writer with many books, from bones to land of laughs to after silence or sleeping in flames, very high in my list. I just wish he took some time to reconsider his work and the path he is following. Maybe it is the right one, and I just can't see it, but deep in my heart, reading this book, as the two or three previous, I felt something was deeply wrong. I'm still hopeful, though, and I wait anxiously for the next one. May it be the return of Carroll to the standard he set years ago.
Rating:
Summary: in the sandbox with Wittgenstein
Review: Full disclosure: this review belongs in the I-love-Jonathan-Carroll-but category.Obviously anyone who adores Carroll's unique brand of metaphysical surrealism will want to read WHITE APPLES. The problem with the book isn't so much that Carroll has created unsympathetic characters this time around (though the adoption of third-person narration does distance them from the reader), nor that Carroll's beliefs about the afterlife are becoming drearily New Age (though they may well be). The problem is that Carroll's writing is not consistently up to his best. Carroll's work has always been defined as much by its metaphysics as by its surrealism, but in his very best novels--THE LAND OF LAUGHS, THE WOODEN SEA--the metaphysics is folded expertly into the plot. Large swaths of WHITE APPLES are given over to metaphysical exchanges. During these intervals not only does interest in the plot lag, but interest in the characters does too: very little, at least in the course of these metaphysical exchanges, distinguishes WHITE APPLES's protagonists from dozens of previous Carroll creations. In the book's most relentlessly metaphysical passages, Vincent, Isabelle, Coco, Bruno, and the enigmatic Tillman Reeves are merely cardboard cut-outs. This, combined with the aforementioned third-person narration, is not good. The other problem with WHITE APPLES is that many of the more surprising and/or surrealist moments lack the shockingly strange verve of Carroll's best work. Coco Hallis's odd dietary predilections aren't anything we haven't already seen in, for example, the TERMINATOR movies, while Isabelle's exchanges with her grandmother feel like outtakes from other, better Carroll novels. Carroll's views about the afterlife get a few new twists here, but by and large he's rehashing older material (though not as egregiously as he did in his recent contribution to CONJUNCTIONS magazine's New Fabulism issue). Only in two splendid scenes--a confrontation with the forces of Chaos at the local zoo, and Bruno Mann's journey to consult with the enigmatic but powerful King of the Park--does the writing in WHITE APPLES approach Carroll's best. I'm almost willing to recommend the book based on these two scenes alone. But readers looking for a more consistently engaging entry into Carroll's worlds should stick with THE LAND OF LAUGHS or THE WOODEN SEA.
Rating:
Summary: in the sandbox with Wittgenstein
Review: Full disclosure: this review belongs in the I-love-Jonathan-Carroll-but category. Obviously anyone who adores Carroll's unique brand of metaphysical surrealism will want to read WHITE APPLES. The problem with the book isn't so much that Carroll has created unsympathetic characters this time around (though the adoption of third-person narration does distance them from the reader), nor that Carroll's beliefs about the afterlife are becoming drearily New Age (though they may well be). The problem is that Carroll's writing is not consistently up to his best. Carroll's work has always been defined as much by its metaphysics as by its surrealism, but in his very best novels--THE LAND OF LAUGHS, THE WOODEN SEA--the metaphysics is folded expertly into the plot. Large swaths of WHITE APPLES are given over to metaphysical exchanges. During these intervals not only does interest in the plot lag, but interest in the characters does too: very little, at least in the course of these metaphysical exchanges, distinguishes WHITE APPLES's protagonists from dozens of previous Carroll creations. In the book's most relentlessly metaphysical passages, Vincent, Isabelle, Coco, Bruno, and the enigmatic Tillman Reeves are merely cardboard cut-outs. This, combined with the aforementioned third-person narration, is not good. The other problem with WHITE APPLES is that many of the more surprising and/or surrealist moments lack the shockingly strange verve of Carroll's best work. Coco Hallis's odd dietary predilections aren't anything we haven't already seen in, for example, the TERMINATOR movies, while Isabelle's exchanges with her grandmother feel like outtakes from other, better Carroll novels. Carroll's views about the afterlife get a few new twists here, but by and large he's rehashing older material (though not as egregiously as he did in his recent contribution to CONJUNCTIONS magazine's New Fabulism issue). Only in two splendid scenes--a confrontation with the forces of Chaos at the local zoo, and Bruno Mann's journey to consult with the enigmatic but powerful King of the Park--does the writing in WHITE APPLES approach Carroll's best. I'm almost willing to recommend the book based on these two scenes alone. But readers looking for a more consistently engaging entry into Carroll's worlds should stick with THE LAND OF LAUGHS or THE WOODEN SEA.
Rating:
Summary: great mainstream novel
Review: I agree with a previous review that this is an excellent book but not at all as surreal as I would have liked. But for a mainstream author, Carroll is one of the best. Very imaginative, yet still appeals to the masses. But if you are thinking about buying this book because somebody told you it was extremely surreal and subversive you might want to check out the anti-mainstream surreal author Carlton Mellick III.
Rating:
Summary: great mainstream novel
Review: I agree with a previous review that this is an excellent book but not at all as surreal as I would have liked. But for a mainstream author, Carroll is one of the best. Very imaginative, yet still appeals to the masses. But if you are thinking about buying this book because somebody told you it was extremely surreal and subversive you might want to check out the anti-mainstream surreal author Carlton Mellick III.
Rating:
Summary: a weak effort
Review: I am somehow perplexed at some of the enthusiastic raves posted by previous reviewers. I remember fondly some of Carroll's early novels, but I am sorry to confess I have to agree with those who feel that for the past three o four novels his standards have been declining with each book. White Apples may be, for this reader, his weakest effort to date. I am afraid the author's cult status has somehow damaged his own perception of his work. The best parts of White Apples feel like a pallid imitation of his early books and the worst, well... Apparently, hardcore fans will keep on cheering no matter what, but I am afraid that these last Carroll novels will quickly fade away, unlike the great "voice of our shadow" or "bones of the moon" or "land of laughs". Sometimes a great author goes the wrong way. There is nothing wrong in aknowledging it, both on his part and on his fans' part. It may even be positive. For whatever it is worth to the potential reader, I returned this book to the store after I finished it. I did not want to keep it, or pass it to a friend.
Rating:
Summary: Not what you think.
Review: I bought and read this novel because it has a very strong reputation as being a new surrealist classic. Being a [fan] for surrealism, I was sure I would like this book. Now, this book is a fine novel, it's even a very touching love story. But it is not surrealist, and because of that it left me very disapointed. If you like authors like Neil Gaiman and James Stoddard, I WOULD recommend this book. It is much more in the vein of their dark fantasy. I suppose that a true surrealist novel can't have a plot, because surrealism is does not follow waking logic. But this book very much does follow a plot and logic. Everything in Carroll's universe can be explained through his rules about what afterlife is, and how it affects (before)life. It is a good book, but it isn't what it is advertised as being. If you are looking for a surreal novel, go get One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or stick with the original Carroll. But if you like contemporary fantasy, this isn't a bad choice at all.
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