Flee by Evan Dara
My rating: 5/5 cats
this book takes place in vermont.
that should be the whole review, really, because it is so difficult to know where to even begin to review an evan dara book. i have made two attempts before, for his previous two novels, and both of them were just me gushing without anything substantive to say.
and then i remember who i am, and that that’s what i do. so here we are.
and i’m about to gush. stand back.
evan freaking dara. light of my life, fire of my loins. why does no one else write like he writes? he will just pitch the reader into a situation with no omniscient narrator or pesky physical descriptions, and no characters really, not in any traditional sense. just… dialogue. monologues. a tornado of humanity stripped to its barest essence. and you are just caught up in his words in the most delightful updraft as you slowly find your footing and follow the story in a picture-puzzle way where he is deliberately holding onto several middle-pieces. but it’s not frustrating. it’s not “look at me, i am the author and i control you!” it is just… fun. it is an experience. it is an offering. it is a gut-punch of discovery that makes you remember why you love to read in the first place. so many books will just lead you. dara reminds you that you are an integral part of the experience.
but, now, in this one, surprise! there are characters to follow, and there are great narrative chunks in the middle of the splintered collage of voices with recurring and recognizable “faces,” and their plot progresses in a linear fashion, but always always in the background, in the underneath, this chorus of frustration and confusion and want and need and fear and unease as the town’s inhabitants disappear, are taken, or flee.
it’s just gorgeous, all of it. a big fat bowl of word-soup with all the flow and finesse that i have come to crave, since reading him for the first time.
i wish more people had read him. i wish his books hadn’t been so hard to get for so long. i wish that more people had read The Sea Came in at Midnight, which is the one of the only other books that has ever made me feel this way, so i could say “it is like that; it made me feel like that,” and more of you would know what i meant. infinite jest is close, in its shape, but dara does something earthier, something more universal. something difficult to pin down.
here’s a good chunk, and one that is a really good example of the pervasive dread and spookiness that underscores the whole book:
So, on my own, I scanned around. And what I saw was, yes, there were still customers in the store, by no means a sure thing. In fact, they had quite a few, looking at maps, trying on sunhats, browsing, a good number of them. But.
But this young lady flicking through a rack of jerseys was making those hanger-tops click over and over again, all up and down the rack, way across size lines. But this guy checking pool cues for straightness placed their thick ends by his nose and looked down those things for a hell of a long time. He picked up and put down the same two, three cues over and over again. And this other guy was just like standing in the corner looking at sunscreen, without actually taking any of the bottles or tubes from the shelves. And other such, just like that. Movement without movement, or progression. And all of them new faces to me.
Were they buying? Or were they what, just passing the time? Weird. I got my water cooler and got out of there.
god, i love him.
even just the little isolated lines that pop up in the chorus of voices – they are simple and brief, but staggering:
–Is there enough room in the world for all the things that have been taken away from me– ?
–Only absence lasts forever.
and the whole scene of the town hall meeting over the solar panels had me laugh-snorting like a fool.
it’s just a triumph, there’s nothing else i can say about it.
here, jeff has written a review of this one
and also the biggest dara fanboy ever, steve, has done some remarkable annotating.
here, you can buy all his books here: http://aurora148.com/flee.php
do it.
because sometimes, just sometimes, i get things right.
