D. Foy - With influences that range from Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and a prose that possesses a fast, strange, perennially changing rhythm that’s somewhat akin to some of John Coltrane’s wildest compositions, this narrative is at once emotionally gritty and surprisingly beautiful even during its darkest moments

D. Foy, Made to Break, Two Dollar Radio, 2014.

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Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They've been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.
After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions, considering what they mean to one another and to themselves.
With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño.

D. Foy Interviewed by Eric Obenauf at Two Dollar Radio


"Strange and freewheeling... forsaking plot in favor of something much more cerebral and immediate. Made to Break works its English over, coining fresh and sometimes unapologetically awkward phrases to milk out something strange and animate."-Los Angeles Review of Books

"[Made to Break] reads like a macabre mumblecore script penned by Jim Thompson. It’s one swell medley of mayhem and defeat dashed together by the vitality of D. Foy’s prose. Zainy, sly, and darkly comedic."-Entropy Magazine

Debut novelist D. Foy uses a poetic and gritty genre-clashing voice to construct a winter horrorland. On New Year’s Eve in 1995, five burnouts head to a cabin in the woods near Lake Tahoe to do drugs and have sex. The narrator, Andrew, brings his love interest, Hickory, to join three friends he has known for over a decade. Dinky is the owner of the cabin and the most amiable of the group; Basil is Andrew’s semi-rival and ex-bandmate. The crux of the social drama revolves around Lucille, who is Andrew’s former roommate, Dinky’s ex-girlfriend, Basil’s current girlfriend, and the only one who seems to finally be growing up. One chapter in, a car crash leaves Andrew and Dinky stranded, until they’re picked up by Super, an ex-Vietnam vet who hangs a dead monkey from his dashboard, has a doll collection in his back seat, rambles in nonsense metaphors, and smokes very strong dope. Back at the cabin, Dinky becomes fatally ill. A torrential storm keeps them from leaving. Memories are awakened, secrets are revealed, and strange noises begin to create a tension that intoxication cannot fully repress. Foy’s voice is artful at times, but is often drowned out by the vulgarity. Still, the novel has some appeal as a B-movie-like thriller with occasional poetic undertones. - Publishers Weekly


Probably the closest I’ve ever come to death was the New Year’s when my good friend Nate nearly took my head off with a shotgun blast. We were all drunk on a ranch in South Texas, and at midnight, through the twisted dance of bodies hugging other bodies, I saw Nate walk toward me with a 20-gauge, hoping to announce the New Year with a gunshot toward the open sky. I stood up to get out of his way right as he pulled the trigger; the gun went off inches above my right ear. I reeled and all sound went blank. Everyone else was pissed, and Nate stood holding the gun, in disbelief at what he’d almost done. Maybe what’s stupidest and most impressive about the whole thing, though, was how soon the night recalibrated, how quickly we returned to the drinks and the stories and the singing of songs. As if the near brush with chaos proved how resilient we really were, how death was just something you were bound to brush up against if you were friends with someone for that long.
One thing D. Foy’s menacing and dense first novel, Made to Break, understands extremely well is the strange, exhilarating, depressing, and often stupid and dangerous territory of longtime friendship. Foy strands five friends—AJ, Lucille, Hickory, Dinky, and Basil—at a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe over New Year’s. The novel spans only a weekend, but man is it a long one. Locked in isolation, the lines between friendship and parasitism blur completely, and love reveals its most painful fronts: cruel inside jokes, pissing contests, past hurts, and lots and lots of insobriety.
Heading into the weekend, things are already on edge; the group’s been on a cocaine-fueled bender since Christmas Day. The Tahoe trip serves ostensibly as an extended last hurrah for Lucille, who’s given up her dreams of becoming a painter to sell out to the world “of corporate jobs and big-big coin.” Lucille and Dinky dated at one point, but then Lucille slept with Basil so now she’s with him. AJ, who narrates, feels hounded by his own demons, caught up in his romantic feelings for Hickory while at the same time wallowing in profound self-doubt. “All I’d known in the days before was a lie,” he tells us in the novel’s opening moments, “I myself was a liar and a lie…”
The first thing they find at the cabin is a neglected lovebird, dead and rotting on the living room floor. We immediately see it as the coalmine canary, warning the group that a secluded, whiskey-flooded weekend together is the last thing they need. But the five friends can’t, or won’t, read the signs, and things get messy quick. Torrential rains hit Tahoe and mudslides cover the roads. AJ and Dinky wreck the truck, leaving Dinky with internal injuries and no egress to a hospital. The only thing left for them to do is wait out the storm and talk.
Foy’s initial setup calls to mind the frontier stories of Stephen Crane and Jack London, one where the scenic backdrop is less about a realistic rendering of space and more interested in creating a mythic, impressionistic arena for testing the ties binding a group of people together. The rain lashing Tahoe is intentionally hyperbolic, and Foy’s sound-driven descriptions read operatically. “The stars were dead. The night was rage. The earth was sick with danger,” AJ thinks on their first approach to the cabin. And later, “Trees flashed by, now sparkling, now black, a strobic land of bugaboos dreamed and real.” These are stage directions out of high melodrama, narrative description meant to ready us for the most heightened edges of human behavior: fear, the drive for dominance, and feral self-preservation.
This external landscape, of course, also mirrors the interpersonal weather brewing inside the cabin. As the days pass, the group’s drunkenness deepens while Dinky’s condition gets worse. With nothing to do but talk, secrets seep out and old wounds reopen. We learn of Hickory’s mysterious past, Basil’s sexual coming-of-age with a stuffed monkey, Dinky’s reasons for enlisting in the army, and Lucille’s numerous infidelities. Most importantly, though, we hear the long history of petty cruelties these friends have inflicted on one another over the years in the name of one-upmanship or the simple alleviation of boredom.

D. Foy

This drive for dirt and hurt feelings is perhaps the main thing keeping these characters together. AJ can sense a twisted logic in these rituals of self-laceration and humiliation, the way these hurtful conversations act as an interpersonal amphetamine that sustains the group and keeps it going:

The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need.

In between the sadistic bouts at the cabin, Foy introduces us to Super, a longtime local resident who might be the group’s only hope of getting off the mountain. Driving a pickup whose bed is littered with dismembered dolls, the broken-toothed Super operates as the novel’s spiritual guide. As he offers rides to the stranded or repairs the cabin’s downed phone line, he spouts cryptic wisdom, a gnostic in the midst of the great flood and perhaps the only character in the novel who sees the group’s precarious isolation as an illustration of a much darker cosmic truth:

It grieved him to his heart, Super said, that the powers had ever made human kind, and worse, that he’d been born unto humans. He praised the storm if only that it might blot from the earth not just him and Basil but all humankind, people together with animals and creeping things and creatures of the air. The earth was corrupt, he said, the earth was filled with violence.

This cosmic darkness, the earth’s default setting of violence, is at the core of Foy’s vision in Made to Break. And it affects AJ most profoundly. Once the rains finally temper around Tahoe, he’s the one who’s left to sort through the wreckage. He gives us his story in hindsight, now living alone in a trailer park outside Sacramento, where he scrapes together a living by transporting crops and cleaning school toilets at night. In these quieter moments, far removed from the heated events of the New Year’s weekend, AJ can survey the razed landscape of his friendships. He sees the scars he’s both inflicted and suffered, and his final appraisal reeks of resignation and self-loathing: “There are times you see the rot you’ve always been.”
At one point during the weekend, AJ goes looking for help and comes across an isolated tent in the middle of the storm. Its presence scares him initially—who knows what kind of fucked-up danger could be lurking in a tent on the side of a mountain—but he becomes even more frightened when he enters the tent and finds it empty:

And it was then I saw the nature of terror, because it was then the nature of my predicament, like a toxic cloud, swallowed me utterly up. Terror, I realized, had nothing to do with time and space but with the absence of them, and with the incomprehensibility of that absence. There before that rotting little tent empty in the night in the glade in the forest in the heart of a pulsing storm, the emptiness of my life, and of my aloneness in it, usurped my thoughts with cruelty I couldn’t fathom.

What frightens AJ most is isolation, the nothingness he knows is a fundamental fact. And on one level, his weekend—the drinking, his love for Hickory, his painful jousting with Lucille, Basil, and Dinky—shows how far he’s willing to go to stave off his own loneliness. In the end, for AJ, and perhaps for us all, it’s far less terrifying to reveal our softest, most vulnerable spots to cruel friends than it is to admit that, in the end, we’re all in this by ourselves. - Michael Jauchen


It could be the start of a horror movie. Two days before New Year’s, five friends head to a cabin in Nevada for a week of raucous partying. They’ve got enough Old Crow to drown an elephant and more memories shared between them than an old timer’s club. This shindig, which gets cut tragically short, is a send-off for Lucy, aka Lady Hatchet, who will soon be starting a corporate gig. “The night was rage,” thinks AJ, our narrator, as their first evening rears into gear. In this isolated cabin, these five friends—Dinky, Hickory, Basil, Lucy, and AJ—get down to it while outside the world is washed away by a God-is-punishing-us rain.
There’s no bottom until you hit it, we’re reminded throughout D. Foy’s first novel Made To Break, which was published by Two Dollar Radio last week. Taking place over the course of a hellish 36 hours, it reads like a macabre mumblecore script penned by Jim Thompson. There’s the non-stop cuss-encrusted dialogue (where “Fucking banana dick!” and “trust-fund piece of crap“ are bandied about as cordial insults); there’s the weird, almost unbreakable bond of friendship that holds these fools tight; there’s enough cool culture to keep you on your hip toes (Jim Carroll, Klaus Kinski, and Chips Ahoy all get shout-outs); and there’s this psychotic union of invulnerability, bug-eyed terror, and shrill laughter, a symbiotic mix that’s the result of too much drinking and too many drugs. It’s one swell medley of mayhem and defeat dashed together by the vitality of D. Foy’s prose.
Soon as the novel begins, we’re already on a collision course with disaster. While on a quick trip to the convenience store, AJ and Dinky get into a crash, leaving Dinky looking “downright fucked.” Luckily, they’re rescued by Super, a “grizzled old man” who, with his truck full of broken doll parts and dog named Fortinbras, has stepped right out of a slasher movie parody. “You’ll do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you’ve got,” Super says, before taking AJ and Dinky back to the cabin. Calamity ensues. And so the night goes, with injury, humiliation, violence, and kindness blending together. It’s a scene where Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can be quoted liked a religious text and Iggy Pop and Jelly Roll Morton serve as the poets laureate. At times, AJ frets about his past and future. He wonders when they’ll reach the end of excess. “In all our years,” AJ thinks, “our lasting pride was standing off the Comedown.” But he knows such a crash is inevitable. Anyway, they’re getting too old for this roller coaster ride of recklessness. “Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption?” asks poet A.R. Ammons. Which is where we all find ourselves every now and then. Right up in that asshole, squealing for redemption.
One challenge with dialogue in books—versus in movies or plays where talking, shouting, and other sounds can easily be overlaid—is how to create a manageable cacophony. After a few drinks, or even without them, our words are often at war with each other’s. I’ve started speaking before you’ve finished your thoughts and Georgie is already chiming in with an anecdote of his own. How does a writer create this verve of voices on the static page? The pace, punch, and spontaneity of D. Foy’s dialogue show how it’s done:
“Let us drink,” I shouted, “to the success of Lucille Bonnery. May she live long and prosper in her new status as Queen of the Corporate Raiders.”
Dinky found the strength to burble “Hear! Hear!” while Basil sat up with “I’ll drink to that—hell, I’ll drink to anything!” They emptied their glasses with a single draught, Hickory and Lucille, too. “A toast!” they said, and drank.
The second sentence displays an inventiveness for interweaving dialogue. By combining two quick cheers, from Dinky and Basil, into a single line, D. Foy overlaps their voices. Then by naming Hickory and Lucy in the next sentence you get to hear everyone, individually and all at once. Each voice is audible simultaneously. It’s like the writer is at the mixing board, twisting the knobs until the levels are just right.
By establishing a vernacular unique to this group of ruthless friends, D. Foy also develops a narrative force that can be propelled by conversation alone. This is particularly true for the chapters where monologues dominate, monologues that are realistically intercut and thus driven by the other characters’ interruptions. Ever wanted to know what it’s like to boff a stuffed animal monkey at age ten? Look no further than Basil’s monologue about this puerile encounter. “There’s more,” AJ says about Basil after learning of the stuffed monkey affair. “There’s always more with this guy.” The same could be said of D. Foy. More frightfully good tales are told over a wicked game of Truth or Dare, with the monologue-ers powering through their friends’ jerky commentary to pull back the scab of shame and reveal the storyteller’s lurid wound of truth. It’s intimate. Horrible, embarrassing, distasteful, and gross, but definitely intimate.
In one sense, Made To Break fits into a familiar literary genre, call it “DRUGS! Liberators of the Soul,” where even if many horrible things happen the overriding message is that it was well worth it because only through a descent into substance abuse and madness can the protagonist truly sate his desire to be free—free from the shackles of bourgeois tyranny, free from responsibility, free from life. Books like Fear and Loathing, Trainspotting, Jesus’ Son, and The Basketball Diaries fit into this genre. Here young men (and with the exception of Fiona Maazel’s Last Last Chance, it’s always young men) pursue drugs because they’re an appealing escape and opportunity for adventure, sort of like a real estate company offering a one-season stay in Hell. And Hell isn’t that bad once you get chummy with the residents. In fact, it can be quite fun if you’re only renting.
In another sense, however, Made To Break reads strictly as a parable about the end of youth—youth, that long malaise of endless adolescence, which now seems to stretch until age thirty (or however old Jimmy Chen is). In this parable reading, the excesses, chaos, and pain become universal. They turn into symbols any reader can relate to. They’re the typical chicanery, awesomeness, and stupidity of youth. Even death becomes a symbol, representing not the cessation of life but, instead, the collapse of friendships we once believed would hold forever. All those people you thought you’d always be chill with at some point they’ve moved off or gone corporate or gotten married. And that’s that. What you shared and cherished is now little more than a few bad Facebook pics and some memories wilted at the edges, the last vestige a lingering for what’s been lost—this is what AJ calls “[t]hat familiar longing for my noons of summer”—a dreamy, easily ignored pining for those glory days (and nights) of time so well misspent.
Ultimately, whatever your take on the book, page by page it is a blast to read. If here or there there’s a line that could’ve been edited out that also fits into the vision of excess. D. Foy’s world is awash in words. The good times roll until AJ and his friends inevitably give a big, ole a kiss to the asshole of comedown and their long nights fueled by bourbon and talk finally get stamped out like a cigarette butt. Morning and redemption will be here before they know it. Zainy, sly, and darkly comedic, Made to Break is a heartfelt ode to the brutalities of friendship and those wild youthful times (who wouldn’t still cling to?) when “[t]he only things that mattered were books and booze.” - Alex Kalamaroff

Friendship is a two-headed beast. As humans, our continuous need for interaction, communication, and companionship regularly clashes with fear of exposure, the sourness that comes from the inevitable accumulation of failures in life, and our proclivity toward pettiness when faced with frustrating situations. In Made To Break, author D. Foy explores the conflicting sides of amity as well as the unexplainable cohesive element that hides in the interstitial spaces between the good and the bad and ultimately holds friendships together.
Lucille wants to celebrate her new high-paying corporate job, so she decides to spend New Years’ Eve weekend drinking and getting high in a cabin in Lake Tahoe with Dinky, Andrew, Hickory, and Basil. When the five friends get there, there’s a dead caged bird filling Dinky’s family cabin with the smell of rot. Instead of taking it as a bad omen, the group starts talking about childhood pets and argue about who’s going to get ice. Dinky and Andrew end up having to leave the cabin despite that fact that weather forecasts warn of an impending flood. On their way to town, they crash their truck and Dinky is seriously injured. Broken and without ice, they finally encounter a strange man called Super who takes them back to the cabin. With the storm raging outside, no car, and the phone lines dead, the group turn to a game of Truth or Dare to help them pass the time until the sky clears and help can arrive. However, what starts as a game quickly transforms into a series of attacks, thinly veiled insults, and cruel accusations. Old wounds bleed again and new ones open up while weather conditions worsen and Dinky’s health deteriorates. Before the night is over, everyone will have to face, and question, themselves, death, and each other.
Nothing is what it seems to be in this narrative. There’s supposed to be a celebratory mood in the air, but hidden agendas, snarky comebacks, and the type of wittier-than-thou personalities that inevitably cause conflict whenever they’re put together give the novel a surprisingly oppressive and noirish atmosphere that it never shakes off. Andrew acts as narrator and slowly reveals his crush on Hickory and a romantic triangle between Dinky, Basil, and Lucille. With each revelation, a piece of each character is exposed, and they’re all flawed. While being imperfect is part of human nature, when flaws are exposed in public and boosted by vindictiveness, they become enlarged and serve only to inflame any situation and bring forth retaliation. Foy understands this, and so do his characters. However, knowing about it doesn’t stop them from repeatedly trying their best to eviscerate each other with words, fully aware of the fact that they’re using them as weapons and deriving a bizarre pleasure from it:
“There was that briefest moment of doubt where Basil and I considered exchanging our knives for guns or throwing the knives away. But really the doubt was feigned. We knew what would happen. The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need. Basil and I were Siamese twins parted only in flesh.”
Foy, who was an ubiquitous online presence during the novel’s pre-launch tour, calls Made To Break a “gutter opera,” and the term is very accurate. With influences that range from Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and a prose that possesses a fast, strange, perennially changing rhythm that’s somewhat akin to some of John Coltrane’s wildest compositions, this narrative is at once emotionally gritty and surprisingly beautiful even during its darkest moments. Foy has a way with words, and the result is a novel that’s comfortably nestled in literary fiction but has tendrils that reach out and touch on noir, tragedy, romance, nostalgia, and even humor.
Made To Break could be interpreted as an ode to the 90s, a sharp commentary on the capricious nature of desire, or a deconstruction of friendship when it’s built on weak ties. The characters have known each other for years, but they’re more interested in insulting each other than on surviving the night unscathed. Between memories being used as weapons, the desperation of being trapped, and the booze and drugs, the group dynamic morphs into something dark and dangerous before eventually becoming something entirely different and seemingly more positive. The shift is a crescendo that helps Foy deliver blistering passages full of poetry and strangeness. Some of the best come when Super is around:
“Super swore about certain pods of anguish, of how soon, on a bed of niggardly hearts and jealous bones, beaks sewn shut with bloody thread and the toes of babes hacked off with shears, those pods would blossom into flowers of spleen, and the colossus of venality humanity had become would shudder and by crappers crumble in that swarm. Super was mad. The moon had come too near, he said. The eagle should never had landed. And the man on the moon was a whoreson goon and all the world his toilet.”
Despite the plethora of elements that make Made To Break a success and a pleasure to read, the most impressive thing about it is that it’s a debut novel. Foy has delivered the kind of notable narrative that pulls an author out of the very crowded rookie pool and places him at the top of the list of fresh voices that readers of outstanding fiction should keep on their radar. - Gabino Iglesias

Made to Break, D. Foy’s debut novel, snaps. The scenes are succinct, by and large; the patter of the characters rolls right along, whether you catch their drift or not. The experience of reading is not dissimilar to tagging along with a crowd of hard-partying familiars, each well known to the other, the string of knowing allusions and rivalrous looks, the night going somewhere nobody can name for sure and nobody would want to name. Not knowing is half the fun.
And, hey: this also happens to be the novel’s subject.
Yet, to repurpose words spoken by The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, “If history has taught us anything, it is that you can criticize any novel.” As novels go, Made to Break registers as one unafraid of criticism. It wears its flaws like the body armor in a Mad Max movie or, better yet, Frankenstein’s network of scars. Look no further than the title: D. Foy’s fiction is the kind that could very well shatter in your hands.
You might find that you know his people, have encountered their like before: an alpha male whose entire sense of self rests on the perception of alpha-ness; a good-natured glutton for punishment whose generosity is matched only by his recklessness; a fun-loving woman whose exhausted artistic ambition drives her toward the embrace of corporate America. But Made to Break is not a venture in realism, at least not a straightforward one. The best way to describe what Foy is doing is to say he sets a cast of keenly observed characters in a landscape of genre pastiche. The real gets wrapped up in the artificial and bucks at the constraints of convention.
Akin in spirit to David Foster Wallace’s ungainly short story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” and echoing the signature cadences of Kerouac, the narrative of Made to Break puts the machina back in deus ex, and then, in case you can’t believe your eyes, does it again: “For a single hideous moment, there in the slippery rain, surrounded by the only people I’d ever truly known and who for that reason were strangers, I saw the ruin of distinctions … There’s no such thing, after all, as the Comedown, so long as we never called it.”
A moment, though, for plot: five close friends—three guys, two gals—head to a remote cabin in the woods off Lake Tahoe to party like rock stars on the day before New Year’s Eve, 1996.  In fact, some are rock stars, or at least, as musicians, once desired to be. There is an auto accident and one of their number—the son of the cabin’s owners—ends up in a bad way. The other passenger on the ill-fated ride, Andrew Jackson Harerama vanden Heuvel, crawls from the wreckage unscathed.  Except emotionally: “Where were all the lovely people? Where were all the vermin, and where were all the stars?”
Made to Break is the kind of novel where the accident victim, on waking, says in quasi-prophetic mode, “It used to be when I coughed I heard bees in my head. Now all I hear is fire.” Back at the cabin, everyone is having too much fun, or too far gone, to do much of anything on his behalf.  Besides, as in a horror movie, the road has flooded. And there is a strange Hamlet-quoting old man with a truck, a dog named Fortinbras, and a petrified monkey dangling over his dashboard. Like a critic of debut fiction, the old man wants nothing more than to aid, or deconstruct, the revelers: it is not immediately clear which. This becomes a scary brand of not knowing.
In conversation with The Paris Review in the early aughts, novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem reflected on what compels him to write: “I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.  It’s a form of autism, perhaps. I’ve never felt I had to pick from among these things and renounce those others. Good stuff’s found across the spectrum.”
A decade down the line, Lethem’s call of the wild has resonated widely. Foy subscribes to a similar school of thought: literary, cinematic, and pop enthusiasms fill his debut to bursting. A reader senses both storyteller and critic fighting for full expression on the page, one facet overlaying the other. In that sense, Made to Break is a prototypical first work, one deeply indebted to forebears, a cauldron of echoes, an admixture in demand of future refinement.
Or so a critic might aver. Speaking with The Tottenville Review, Foy calls his school of writing “gutter opera.”  “I reached a place after a time where a single form or style or technique felt insufficient to my needs,” he said. “I wanted to create autobiography as fiction. I wanted to engage social analysis as self-ethnography.  And I wanted to write fiction as cultural criticism.  Gutter opera gave me these freedoms.”
If acting as the first critic to label his own efforts risks incarnating the mythic Ouroboros, then consider how, throughout the modern era, artists have founded movements to alert critics of their intentions and, in so doing, helped shape their own receptions.  What’s unique in this deregulated age, where anyone and everyone can be a critic (so, who, really, can claim any kind of special provenance?), is that Foy’s movement appears to be utterly his own. He is a writing school of one, and Made to Break ushers his literary energies into categorical existence.
Lethem, for his part, reflecting on the path that led from the semi-obscure pastiche of Gun, With Occasional Music to the triumph of his Brooklyn novels, stated that what he left behind to become a writer of renown was as simple or as complicated as “the writer I wanted to be when I wanted to be so many different writers all at once.” Foy’s published work, at least at present, denies such a path forward.  Made to Break revels in multiplicity, even as its narrative constantly verges on collapse—like that of a beatific thrill-seeker, stoned among the fantastic incongruous. - www.thedailybeast.com/

We’re a little behind the curve in reviewing D. Foy’s debut novel Made to Break, a winter horror of sorts where a group of friends embark for a Tahoe cabin to binge on drugs and booze to ring in the New Year. The literary world has been applauding this book since it hit shelves in March, and while we might be late to the party, don’t count us out—we have applause to offer as well.
Made to Break is a boozy, fast-paced, tweaked out bingefest. Five friends, already high from days of partying, retire to Dinky’s cabin to celebrate New Year’s Eve and spend time with their friend Lucille, who is leaving their world of fun and recklessness for a corporate position. Her job transition serves as the impetus for the party, but also forces the pack of thirty-somethings to examine group dynamics—and thus themselves—on the eve of inevitable change.
When they arrive at the cabin a storm is in effect and the friends have duly ignored any warnings to exercise caution. A dead lovebird on the cabin floor causes the group only momentary pause, though the bird and surging storm outside portends badly. The narrator, AJ, and his friend Dinky, are chosen to leave the cabin for ice and unsurprisingly they incur a car crash. With Dinky severely injured and his car ruined, they are quickly faced with a higher stakes game. Dinky’s condition worsens and with no exit-strategy, group dynamics reach a feverish pitch.
Made to Break primarily focuses on the group: their treatment of Dinky and each other, but it also gives special consideration to AJ and his search for understanding. The setting swells in and out of the novel, creating tension that acts as a vessel to test the characters: “The wind roaring as it was, the water coming down as it was, not from the sky at the moment, but from the trees, with needles and leaves and dirt, and the groaning of the trees and the rush off the mountain of water still in sheets, it was all I could do to keep from turning back.” The disorderly nature of the storm is reminiscent of Jack London, and it contributes to AJ’s inability to come to terms with himself. He exudes a great deal of self-loathing, grappling to what extent he should—or is deserving of— poor treatment from his friends. AJ’s existential crisis drives a great deal of the text and Foy is an expert in unraveling his struggles with empathy and, also, disgust. The fact that AJ is so self-aware of his shortcomings derives sympathy, and Foy handles this beautifully.
The characters in Made to Break are fairy-tale like. With names like Dinky, Basil, Hickory, Lucille, and Super (the long-term Tahoe resident who guides them through the storm), the players contribute to an off-kilter sensation that permeates throughout book. To me, they are meant to be caricatures—the way they treat each other is strange and cruel, yet tinged with love. Their actions are measured, and follow a trajectory just clear enough to make sense, but there is a sense that everything is out of proportion. The entire novel is drug-fueled, which grounds this notion, but there is a more lyrical and headier handling of this group than a simple examination of the trials and tribulations of long-term friendship, and this is enhanced by the warped exposure into these characters’ lives. We all have old wounds, we all carry friendship baggage, but Foy handles this unwieldy and careless bunch with such deft handling, you are privy to a great deal more than first meets the eye.
Made to Break is fast and enjoyable and just cracked out enough to be pleasurable. It shares a kinship with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and On the Road, though it is executed in a style all its own. I’ll leave you with this passage, which feels like a complete offering, a lovely example of what Foy does so well.
Another fit had settled over Dinky, the coughing again, the same spewing again of blood and phlegm. I smoothed his blanket and dabbed his mouth. Hickory told me to kill my smoke, so I got up and took about fourteen slugs of bourbon. Then I went into the storm, hollering out for some wild old man, with his wasted monkey and bed of dolls and dog standing quietly by. An emptiness had opened up inside me. The night was wet and black and empty and cold, and I was scared, more so than I’d ever been. Maybe this is it, I thought, maybe this is where I’ll see the face no one but the dead have ever seen.
Applause, D.Foy. Applause. - Kim Winternheimer