The Walking Tour by Kathryn Davis
My rating: 4/5 cats
wow.
so i finished this book today and rather than start the new book i brought for the subway ride home, i just started this thing all over again.
it’s really good.
that’s why it astounds me that there are so many one- and two-star reviews on here. this is good stuff, guys! i was talking to tom fuller about it today, telling him how many people called this book “confusing” or “boring” or saying that they just didn’t get it. and tom fuller, bless him, said “what the fuck’s there not to get??”
which may be a little disingenuous.
because kathryn davis does not write like nicholas sparks, and people accustomed to reading incredibly basic and paint-by-the-numbers fiction may not be able to follow a book that doesn’t read itself to you, holding your hand all the way.
pay attention.
this here’s literary.
it is not difficult, but i do suggest that you pay attention when you read, which is advice you may feel free to apply to any book you read. it is respectful to the author, after all. this is not a casual beach read, but it shouldn’t intimidate anyone.
she is a gorgeous writer.
They were so young: he’d just finished his junior year at Princeton; if all went well she was going to begin Cooper Union in the fall. Afterward he told her he was majoring in economics and planning to do graduate work at the Wharton School. He didn’t tell her he’d almost flunked out of Princeton, because he knew he was destined for success and the information would be misleading. She told him she’d gotten the only perfect score in the history of Cooper Union on the entrance test where you guessed how many blocks of a variety of sizes went into making a variety of structures of which you could see, say, only part of a side. She didn’t tell him about her mental condition, figuring he’d either deduce it for himself (from the information about the blocks) or else didn’t care about such things. In this way they set the tone for all subsequent pillow talk: suppression disguised as candor.
oh, that’s good…
her mental condition is schizophrenia, and her character is a brilliant, larger-than-life artist whose daughter (probably unreliably, considering genetics) narrates this story which splits into many facets and tells the story of a walking tour gone wrong; relying upon court testimony, a diary, and memory, which necessarily will be full of gaps and deliberate omissions.
this is the third book i have read from her, and i love the way she blends realism with fantasy and keeps the reader guessing. she is masterful, and this book is so much better than the ratings on here would suggest.
will you read it?
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