Kathryn Davis - Soon, a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls

Kathryn Davis, Duplex. Graywolf, 2013.

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other—but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon, a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. Kathryn Davis, an author the Chicago Tribune called “one of the most inventive novelists at work today,” has created here a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there’s no telling where you might come out.

 For a long time now, Davis has been writing fiction like nobody else, at once domestic and entirely strange. Duplex starts out feeling like a picture of neighborhood life in the 1950s but gets astonishingly and fantastically odd as it goes along. It’s a beautifully written, wonderful book and utterly original.  - Brian Evenson

“[I fell] in love with Davis’s writing . . . that combination of horror and excitement that spilled out of the book. . . . [Duplex] wormholes through the real and unreal in a way that is always compelling even if it doesn’t make immediate sense to the top of the mind, the human experience always recognizable even in a world that feels like a much-needed nightmare version of ‘Brigadoon.’ . . . When you are lost in the uncanny woods of this astonishing, double-hinged book, just keep reading, and remember to look up. Kathryn Davis knows right where you are."—The New York Times Book Review 

“Duplex [is] a coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel. . . . Happily, Davis’s storytelling here is not imagistic finger painting. . . . The point of most speculative fiction is to create a world that elevates contemporary social anxieties to the level of nightmare. Duplex does something else. The world it describes has gone cuckoo while its characters’ anxieties remain stubbornly, drably, daringly familiar.”—Tom Bissell

A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year

“Davis’ previous novels have been described as ‘hallucinatory’ and ‘dreamlike,’ and Duplex is no exception. For fans of the fantastical, Davis’ writing style is a glass of ice cold water in today’s desert of conventional fiction.”—Star Tribune

  

"You're unlikely to encounter another fall release brimming with as much imagination as this coming-of-age story by the author of The Thin Place and Versailles. Featuring young love, robots and soul-zapping sorcerers, it's novel in both senses of the word."—Chicago Tribune

“Duplex is utterly compelling and hard to put down. . . . Davis . . . writes with a stunning brilliance, creating fractured worlds that are both extraordinary and routine. . . . [Davis blends] elements of mythology, horror stories, and fairy tales, some so eerily skewed even the Grimm brothers couldn’t have imagined their twists and turns. There’s a trace of a Faustian bargain and Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, as well as hints of allegory. . . . Unforgettable.”—The Boston Globe

“Duplex stuns. . . . Davis exploits the no-man’s land between the strange-but-real and the truly bizarre in sentences and paragraphs so striking they deserve to be memorized. . . . [Duplex] hums with hot blue electricity.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Writers’ Favorite Books of 2013”

Davis’s previous novels—most recently The Thin Place—blur the lines between magic and the mundane, and in this otherworldly novel those borders are eroded, with oddly mixed results. At first glance, Miss Vicks’s grade-school class seems normal enough: there’s delicate Mary, hyperactive Eddie, would-be writer Janice, and rich-kid Walter. But Walter is also a sorcerer, dealing in souls, who seduces Mary away from Eddie. And their suburban street, caught in the mysterious “Space Drift,” seems to eschew the laws of physics. The new neighbors are robots; Miss Vicks walks her dog through a dreamscape; Mary’s child, “Blue-Eyes,” may be a monster; and the beach where Janice plays is home to “Aquanauts,” strange sea creatures with eyes as “large and lustrous as plums.” The book is less a novel than a dream, less populated by characters than by fantasy variations, less an experiment in genre than chaos, and Davis can’t be faulted for her ambition, nor for prose that makes the sky seem like something you’ve never seen and makes robots’ speech utterly quotidian. But where there is no gravity, there can be little pressure, and the result feels somewhat weightless. For all Davis’s virtuosity, readers may have a hard time getting a grip on the story.—Publishers Weekly

Literate science fiction, its deadpan tone controlled, which examines life in a future that may or may not be dystopian.
Davis' (The Thin Place, 2006, etc.) seventh novel is hard to summarize. A terrible catastrophe has occurred, but perhaps it's so long ago that it no longer means much to those alive in the now that the book inhabits. The story begins on a suburban street. Ships called “scows” are visible overhead. We meet Miss Vicks, Mary, Eddie, a sorcerer named Walter (aka “Body-without-Soul”) and a snarky teenage sibyl named Janice—but does she know the past or predict the future? Fortunately, in this future present, people have not lost their sense of humor; they still have irony. The point of view assumes that this strange world—time seems to pass, space seems to have extension—where the quotidian and the menacing mix, where some grow old and die while others, the robots, do not, is consistent. It has an identifiable narrative arc, following the characters who grow up and age, bear real or raise artificial children, and die. As in conventional realist fiction, not all details are essential, either to the story or the characters, but are present only for the sake of verisimilitude. Fiction can consider diverse objects and registers of experience—My Pretty Pony, robots the size of pins, trading cards stored in cigar boxes stashed in a cluttered closet, myths—submerge all in a uniform tone and so create equivalence: a world that is not our world but that is recognizable, consistent and strange.
More fiction than science fiction, admirably written but not for the average reader of the genre, this book will please and surprise.—Kirkus Reviews

"[A] wildly imaginative tale of dualities. . . . Shrewd, wizardly, archly funny, and emotionally fluent Davis recasts fairy tales, warps time and space, illuminates the inner dynamics of robots, takes us to the beach and a creepy girls' boarding school, and subtly envisions the perils global warming will bring. [Duplex] is an intricately fashioned, wryly stylized, through-the-looking-glass novel of forewarning about the essence of being human, endangered souls and 'ancestral memory,' and how stories keep us afloat."—Booklist, starred review

"Kathryn Davis might possibly be one of the most constantly overlooked great novelists around. The type that can make you think that even though you've had your fill of coming-of-age novels, maybe you have room in your life for one more. If that's the case, Duplex is really the book you must seek out."—Flavorwire, "10 Must-Read Books for September"

“Davis is unlike any writer you are likely to read. . . . For Davis, suburbia is a place where the mundane disguises a phantasmagoria of strange characters and events. . . . Fascinating.”—The Kansas City Star

  

 “Duplex is an alluring and bewildering book, the kind you want to read again as soon as you’re finished. . . . Davis has written a fairy tale for our age, a fragmented overlay of many genres: sci-fi, romance, fantasy, horror, all of which arise from a seemingly realistic setting that recalls the world of Cheever and Updike.”—The Fiddleback

"Duplex is an eerie and lucid nightmare. . . . In the style of Ursula LeGuin and Rudyard Kipling, Davis has given us a creepily similar/dissimilar dystopia, and when the reader is able to parse what's familiar and what's not, she can also identify the dystopian elements of her own existence. . . . An enchanting read, a Wonderlandesque adventure."—Bustle

"Kathryn Davis' newest novel . . . captured me completely in its surreal tentacles of imagination and craft. . . . The intense attention to character and the fluid sense of timeline, sprinkled with elements of sci-fi, folktale, and mystery all add to the mesmerizing web of Duplex."—Hazel & Wren

“The world of [Duplex] is both brilliantly strange and gnawingly familiar. . . . This novel’s world continually subverts our expectations; like a dream, it creates and recreates itself before our eyes.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“Duplex is a little island of magic, a fortress of the unknown masquerading in a familiar guise that calls you not only to come inside, but to stay a while.”—Paper Plates

Kelly Link, The Millions, "A Year in Reading"

“Duplex is a coming-of-age novel like no other—it creates a world in which the suburban and boring intersect with straight up sci-fi elements, but every element brims with underlying sexual tension.”—Slaughterhouse 90210

“Kathryn Davis is one of those rare writers whose books I always want to read a second time immediately after I've finished them, not only for their surface pleasures, which are many, but for how much they seem to know about the world, and how puzzlingly they seem to know it. Duplex is no exception. With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that's unlike anyone else’s, creating an atmosphere you don't so much interpret as breathe.”—Kevin Brockmeier

"Hands down, my favorite book of the year. . . . One of the most mesmerizing, hypnotic things I have ever read."—Stacie Michelle Williams

"One of my favorite books of the year. . . . Beautiful, mysterious, and philosophical, with a voice for landscape as lush as any Romantic."—Josh Cook

“Spectacular. . . . Pollockian prose with a fluency to translate stars, Duplex is an inimitable victory for readers and the novel.”—Colin McDonald

Imagine a narrative voice with the attention to detail, reverence for landscape, intelligence, and spirituality of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth, or John Ruskin. Imagine that voice considers suburban America, the streets, the houses, the yards, the cars, the kids. And the voice is not talking about nostalgia for an idealized time that never was (though nostalgia for a time that never was is mentioned) or the American decline (though an intelligent American can't tell stories without a few words skittering across the American decline) but about the confusion of modern reality, the slurry of metaphor and symbolism caught in the dragnet, factory farm, and beer ad of hypercapitalism, corporate politics, quantum physics, and Internet society, the chaotic sludge contemporary life has become. And there is a sorcerer. And robots.
Kathryn Davis's Duplex tells the story of Mary and Eddie from childhood to death. It is about growing up, the foreignness of life's new stages, and the experiences and identities one collects in the process. Learning about sex and not learning about sex. Deciding who you will be, avoiding that decision, and fucking up that decision. The suddenness of old age. The matter-of-factness of death. On my first reading, Duplex felt less like a story and more like a forest of images and metaphors, something to be wandered through rather than followed to a conclusion, but on my second reading I saw loose ends tied up, questions answered, arcs completed, and it was clear that Duplex exists in a powerful middle ground between poetry and story, containing the satisfaction of figuring out mysterious events and the joy of sentences beautiful beyond their context ("Cindy's voice still sounded human but it also sounded as if it had gotten trapped in a box made of metal on a planet in another galaxy and was beating against the sides of the box trying to get out").
The story of Mary and Eddie is interspersed with chapters featuring Janice, the somewhat aloof, somewhat older, somewhat bored leader of a group of otherwise unnamed girls, who tells the great myths (or historic events) of the world. The Rain of Beads. The Four Horsewomen, The Descent of the Aquanauts. At times, Duplex feels like satire; Eddie and Mary are archetypal, the setting could be from Edward Scissorhands, and anything showing mistakes made with technology has to be making a statement. But Duplex isn't satire. Through Janice's stories, Davis argues that myths are not direct allegories for lived experience, but presentations of realities whose people, places, things, and physics follow different rules than we do. The point is not to make correlations between the image of teenage girls accidentally disintegrated by robots who mistook metaphors in romantic poetry for physical acts of love and some aspect of technology and romance in today's culture (though you could), but to discover the properties of our technology and romance through exploring the properties of Duplex's technology and romance. It is a lot to ask of the reader, but great storytellers earn the right to make demands. As Davis writes about Janice, "She made you want to know where she was taking you, even if you didn't want to go." If the storyteller is good enough, she can ask readers everything and take readers anywhere.
The experience I think Davis expresses most powerfully is just how sudden the gradual changes of life feel. At times, Davis uses the fluid physics of the world to approach the idea obliquely: "They were no longer in the tunnel but in a clearing, an immense meadow that appeared to have been recently mowed... when she thought about it, Mary realized she couldn't ever remember coming out of the tunnel." Other times, all the weirdness of the world leads to something you might say in a long talk to your best friend: "The next thing she knew, they were married." Despite clocks and calendars, the big events in our lives always feel like they come out of nowhere. Even when we expect them, even when we know they must happen, even when, like old age, we constantly watch them approach. Near the end of the novel, we see Eddie in a retirement home. He doesn't know what he's doing there. He doesn't feel like he belongs. Then, he is a very old man who can't feed himself. "He felt cold; it suddenly came to him that not all that long ago he had been a young man and that like his fellow human beings he'd always relied on meaninglessly small units for the measurement of time." There is a moment in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator goes to a party after having been away from society for a long time and is surprised to see everyone wearing masks. Then he realizes they aren't wearing masks; his friends had just gotten old. Duplex is the only other work I've read that captures the fact that you can live fifty, sixty, seventy years, alive and observing through each and every year, and only realize you aged in a sudden moment when life forces its inexorable truth into you.
And that is the power of Duplex. The weirdness and wormholes all lead to lines like "The information the robots based their plan on was poetry, which they are incapable of understanding," "If she left him, it would be as good as admitting that practically her whole life had been a mistake," and "Often when you thought back you found yourself in an actual moment like it was a place." Unstable physics, the robots and scows, the unusual power of sorcerers and magic lead to beautiful moments of daily wisdom.
Fifteen pages into Duplex, I was embarrassed that I'd never read Kathryn Davis before. How could someone write such sentences and not be a common name in indie bookstores? How could such an imagination not be a standard by which other imaginations are assessed? How could her name not come up in yearly conversations about major body-of-work prizes? I mentioned to someone that I had a galley of the new Kathryn Davis novel and he didn't ask what I thought of it or what it was about. His eyes lit up and he said, "When is it coming out?" Davis, like many daring and beautiful writers, has her cadre of supporters doing their best to draw attention to the joy they find in her work. After Duplex, she has at least one more. - Josh Cook

Currently on my desk lies a copy of Duplex (pubbing September 3), the latest novel by the immensely talented Kathryn Davis. I remember vividly the moment I started to read the manuscript when it was submitted over a year ago. I thought it would make an excellent candidate for my First Page series. I hope you’ll agree with me that this opening page is a wily stunner. 

One of the most striking things about Duplex, evident from the start, is the utterly brilliant way in which Davis creates a fantastical world of sorcery and imagination that is nevertheless rooted in an almost ludicrously ordinary and recognizable suburban world. She embeds the magical within the mundane, with the latter cajoling us into accepting the former. This strategy is highly efficient, as it eliminates the need for any tedious exposition and forced dialogue of the “Gee whiz, what is that?” variety. 

Here are the opening three paragraphs from the first page:

It was a suburban street, one block long, the houses made of brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think when it was new the street couldn’t help but draw attention to itself, inviting envy.

Miss Vicks lived at the lower end of the street, in number 49. Most of the other houses had families living in them but she was by herself, a woman of about fifty, slim and still attractive, with a red short-haired dachshund. By the time she moved in, the sycamore trees had grown so large they had enormous holes cut through their crowns to make room for all the wires.

She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn’t have to move her head from side to side to take in sound. Every day she and the dachshund went for three walks, the first early in the morning, the second in the late afternoon, and the third after dinner, when the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky. The little dog would sniff around the feet of the sycamores and as it did she would stand there paralyzed as all the Miss Vickses that had ever been layered themselves inside her, one atop the other and increasingly small, forming a great laminate like tree rings around heartwood. 

Let’s take a look at the first paragraph. Many things here emphasize the orderliness of the scene: “built to last” and “regular intervals,” for example. The most dazzling thing is merely the mica sparkling in the concrete, and whoever wrote home about that? There is, however, a minor surprise, “like the third little pig’s,” as it evokes memories of childhood stories, which become a major theme of the whole novel, and also suggests the image of a wolf at the door. 

The second paragraph proceeds fairly normally, too, and introduces one of the main characters, Miss Vicks, a single woman, “of about fifty, slim and still attractive, with a red short-haired dachshund.” So far, so ordinary. 

But the third paragraph opens with this zinger, “She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn’t have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.” 

There is no explanation as to what other kind of woman she might be—if not real—but clearly an alternative reality is going to exist within the framework of this novel’s universe. The sentence that follows appears to revert to the ordinary as it describes when Miss Vicks goes out to walk her little dog. But then we learn that the final time she walks the dog coincides with “when the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky.” Again, no explanation as to what scows are. The narrator is addressing its readers as if we already know about scows, so we are getting a personal observation about the qualities of the scows, not a generalized explanation as to their workings. This, of course, has the effect of making us an implicit part of the world. Reading this, I understand why so many fantastical novels leave me feeling alienated. 

The last sentence of the third paragraph is also quite wonderful, as it describes how Miss Vicks would stand still while the dog sniffed around and “all the Miss Vickses that had ever been layered themselves inside her, one atop the other and increasingly small, forming a great laminate like tree rings around heartwood.” Here, the author is making us think conceptually, not mechanically, and announcing that time is a preoccupation. The idea that we carry all our previous selves along inside us is a much more deeply interesting idea to me than any explanation of the mechanics of the scows could ever be. 

At this point I am already hooked; I know that I am in the hands of a writer who is thoroughly in control of her material and is likely to keep me pleasantly off-kilter as I read on. Davis’s moves are subtle, yet they reverberate. Reading and editing the novel was a huge thrill, as I knew its author was at least three steps ahead of me at every turn. Indeed, it was only after I had read the whole novel that something else from the first paragraph struck me when I returned to it—the “I” in the first paragraph. There is no way to tell early in the novel that this “I” will fade away, and it is something of a fresh shock to rediscover it was there at all. 

And who is that “I”? Read the whole novel, and let me know what you decide.—Fiona McCrae

Kathryn Davis opens her seventh novel, “Duplex,” with a vivid, seductive description of a young boy and girl in what could be any suburban neighborhood in the waning days of summer — curbs lined with sycamore trees fronting houses of brick, parents inside drinking highballs while children play ball in the street or congregate on stoops, where “darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water . . . like falling stars.”

But just as we settle into this quiet evening routine, a sorcerer races his expensive car down the street and we learn that the family in No. 37 is composed of shape-shifting robots, and it quickly becomes clear that while the main protagonists are a young couple this is no ordinary coming-of-age tale or love story. In fact, the dreamlike “Duplex” is not a tale at all, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s more a fluid tapestry of memories and bizarre mythologies interwoven with threads that fray and tear at the slightest touch.

Essentially plotless, the defining arc of “Duplex” is time. But in Davis’s deft hands, the fabric of time is torn and twisted, gnarled and knotted, not just for the readers of this plunge into surrealistic fantasy, but for the characters themselves, who one moment may be pushing a baby in a stroller down a sidewalk, the next struggling down a brambled, root-clogged path with a heavy, talkative child wielding a knife. Day and night, light and dark shift capriciously, with little sense of rhythm or order. Even dreams are frequently hijacked. Often, for those who live in duplexes, “the dreamer’s mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer” in the attached house.

Davis’s cast includes a benevolent teacher named Marjorie Vicks, the aforementioned sorcerer (referred to as “Body-without-Soul’’), and a disingenuous, mean-spirited storyteller-gossip named Janice, who “made you want to know where she was taking you, even if you didn’t want to go.” The central couple is Eddie and Mary, who meet as children, then become young lovers who share “[a]n exquisite bond” until not only time but space warps beyond recognition. All the characters seem to take these mind-boggling slingshots into another dimension matter-of-factly, with little displays of emotion or confusion. It’s not so easy for the reader — just as a moment draws us in, it abruptly cracks apart, leaving us breathless and disoriented. Yet “Duplex” is utterly compelling and hard to put down.
“Duplex” pulses with an undercurrent of frank but shallow sexuality — no emotional connection, all sensation. It ranges from a slightly ominous eroticism, as in the affair between the sorcerer and Miss Vicks, to downright creepy, as in the disturbing cautionary legend of the Rain of Beads. Throughout, Davis (“The Thin Place,” “Versailles”) writes with a stunning visual brilliance, creating fractured worlds that are both extraordinary and routine. She combines details of the commonplace — a woman walking her dachshund down the street, teens making plans for prom — with descriptions of the fantastical that blend elements of mythology, horror stories, and fairy tales, some so eerily skewed even the Grimm brothers couldn’t have imagined their twists and turns. There’s a trace of the Faustian bargain and Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, as well as hints of allegory. “According to the prophecy a child was going to come along that would be part human and part robot and this child was going to change everything.”
“Duplex” seems seeded with symbolism, yet it feels deliberately elliptical, just beyond comprehension. Diving into Davis’s universe is a bit like wading into deep, dark water in which you sense but can’t quite see what’s teeming in the currents below. “Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn’t emerge until there’d been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together.” By this novel’s end, you still may not have that closure. “Duplex” is as confounding as it is provocative. But it’s also unforgettable. - Karen Campbell

Doors are everywhere in fiction. Open doors are portals; if passed through, they become thresholds. Closed doors are lost opportunities (until the heroine finds the key). Sliding doors? Missed connections. Revolving doors? Second chances. Doors may be symbolically played out, but has anyone, before Kathryn Davis in Duplex, ever written a novel about the significance of a hinge?

The peculiar, enchanting Duplex begins on a deceptively normal suburban street, home of Miss Vicks, a teacher, and two of her elementary school students, Mary and Eddie. Mary and Miss Vicks live in the same duplex (different entrances, same multifamily home) but Davis is less concerned with these relationships than with dismantling our familiar conceptions of space and time. Duplex resonates on a unique frequency and forces readers to adjust to its wavelength. It’s a book to tune into rather than break down.

Given Davis’ interest in the realms of the metaphysical and spiritual, it’s no surprise when the quaint suburb turns out to be the eerie kind, a la The Twilight Zone. The duplex is not just a home but an interdimensional hinge between space and time, torqueing and twisting those who enter. Readers meet Miss Vicks as she walks her dachshund past a house belonging to a family of robots. Then a scow descends from the heavens to pick up her pup’s poop while a sorcerer, who happens to be her lover, drives up and sees the street “crawling with souls like the earth with worms.”

The entire neighborhood is affected by the cosmic sway of the duplex, and young Mary learns about the strange properties of her home early on in the novel, mostly for the reader’s benefit: “The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.” Like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia, the duplex functions as both a physical place and a point of access to a different world—one in which past and future collide.

If this sounds puzzling, that’s because it is. A traditional plot or character sketch won’t do this topsy-turvy story justice, and Duplex will be frustrating to readers who demand clarity and continuity. But taken on its own terms—as a book that defies genre and storytelling expectations—this off-kilter world in which humans, robots, and Bodies-without-Souls all co-exist hums beautifully to its own rhythm. It’s a series of dreamlike, often erotic, images and interconnected plot lines that don’t so much build to climax as swell to create an intoxicating atmosphere.

But that doesn’t mean the novel lacks internal coherence. Beneath the gauzy imagery, Duplex is “the story of girls everywhere,” and it’s quite literally a tale of what girls are made of (the robots can remove parts). Many girls slip in and out the novel, and some act in typically girlish ways: They trade cards and tell stories; later, Mary has sex in a bathroom stall with Eddie and wears a pink taffeta dress to prom. But beneath surges an undercurrent of girls we don’t quite know how to place. A little girl opens her mouth to scream; an egg flies in and, later, a chick hatches in her stomach. Powerful girls called Horsewomen don’t die or cast shadows, and their families keep their photos hidden in drawers.

Both literally and figuratively, Davis’ girls and women lose pieces of themselves, and it often occurs when they approach life’s thresholds. At one point, Mary becomes pregnant with Eddie’s baby and gets an abortion, which feels like “a part of her life got sliced into and lifted out like a serving of sheet cake.” In “the rain of beads,” a parable told to Mary and her friends by Janice, a teenage know-it-all who enjoys schooling innocent younger girls, a group of young women are dancing and flirting with robots. On their second date, the teens are carried into the sky by the robots, sure that romance awaits them. Instead, they end up used and heartbroken, and Davis describes their hurt in otherworldly, visceral terms: “It wasn’t like being torn to pieces, because pieces are big. It was like having the smallest parts of your body like the corpuscles and peptides and nuclei and follicles rip loose from one another, every single one of them.” After their horrible dates, the girls come raining down from the sky in the form of colorful beads, and people leave out buckets to try and catch their parts to make them whole again.

The self as a social construct is somewhat familiar territory for Davis, who explored how place and character collide to shape a woman’s life in her novel Versailles, a fictionalized account of Marie Antoinette's life as narrated by her ghost. But in Duplex, Davis goes further by breaking boundaries of space and time. In spirit and style, Davis belongs to a rare tribe of writers who successfully fuse relationships with metaphysics, as Heidi Julavits does in The Vanishers, Jeanette Winterson in Gut Symmetries, or even Rivka Galchen in Atmospheric Disturbances. Like them, Davis interrogates questions about the nature of the universe, and how we function in it, by dressing up existential topics in playful parables and sharp humor. And as Rachel Kushner is in The Flamethrowers, Davis is primarily concerned with women who challenge boundaries. But in Duplex, the limits are metaphysical rather than social or political.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that the hinge is a “place where you could go forward and back with equal ease.” For Davis’ women, it not about whether they become artists, revolutionaries, or housewives, but rather how expertly they control the mechanism that moves them between their former, present, and future selves. They stretch and shape time, swinging back and forth between past and future, lest they allow time to shape them. But of course real women aren’t immune to time. That’s the one boundary they cannot break.

Or can they? Characters in Duplex constantly hear clocks ticking and check their watches. Mary grows up, then old, but her past is constantly cropping up in her future. She is seduced by the sorcerer, Eddie becomes a professional baseball player, and she mothers a little girl, Blue-Eyes, who is really no child at all. Janice, the storyteller, gets older, too, and her condescending attitude to young, sassy girls like she once was, coupled with her time obsession, is revealing: “She blew smoke rings and consulted her wristwatch, busy giving the impression of being a busy person—a busy woman—with things to do, places to go, a whole life to live that had nothing to do with any of us.”

As these references to time build throughout the novel, it’s clear the mystical duplex isn’t as fantastical as it first seemed. After all, the sense of time flying, dragging, or receding is quite real, as anyone who has ever been lost in a memory well knows. It is no accident that Davis subverts the duplex, an iconic image of generic urban America, as a place of magic and possibility. The duplex is a stand-in for those moments and images that feel like portals to other lives, those blips that reveal life’s unexplored possibilities.

“The thing about a life is how hard it is to make it shift course once it’s gotten going,” Mary thinks, musing on what her life could have been, ostensibly with Eddie. Davis cares most of all not about what those alternate paths might have been, but with how it feels to encounter them. This cosmic novel may give readers the dizzying sense of coming unhinged, but it’s also a reminder that the momentum gained from shifting back and forth between possibilities—not the actual going through the door—is the movement that propels us forward. - Alizah Salario

 The first chapter of Kathryn Davis’s latest book, Duplex, is astonishing. Davis wrote the opening sentence as part of a modern day fairy tale, “Body-without-Soul,” which was included in the collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me—and it remains the opening sentence of the novel: “It was a suburban street, one block long, the houses made of brick and built to last like the third little pig’s.”
The character introduced at the get-go is Miss Vicks, an attractive 50-year-old schoolteacher who lives in a duplex at the end of the street with her little red dachshund. “She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn’t have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.” If your inclination is to read that sentence, and then read it again, you’ll find that your confusion is actually an instinct, and you’re onto something.
Davis pans out to the rest of the neighborhood—children playing in the street, girls trading cards with each other on porch stoops, fireflies “prickling like light on water.” At this point, it seems obvious that the book will be set in the 1950’s or early 60’s, on one of the new suburban streets that would come to define America in the second half of the century. There are two children in particular—Mary and Eddie—whom Davis zooms in on, and their fondness for each other is obvious. It seems fitting to expect that the story will unfold as a suburban one, with some human failure along the way, brought about by the tedium of parents putting their children to bed and drinking highballs on the last night of summer.
But then mid-way into the scene: “Headlights appeared; the boys scattered…. The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul.”
Yes, sorcerer—and not just any sorcerer: Miss Vicks’ past lover. We’re told that he “could make things appear or he could make them vanish; he could make them turn into other things or he could make them vibrate at unprecedented frequencies, the explanation for his great success in bed.” After the sorcerer disappears from the street, Eddie disappears, too, and Mary can’t stop worrying about him.
While Davis defies genre in Duplex by crossing through several types—literary fiction, magical realism, fantasy, sci-fi, horror (to name a few)—many elements of the novel stay true to a fairy tale. The book largely revolves around the love story of Mary and Eddie, and the turning point in their relationship comes on that end-of-summer night in the first chapter, when Body-without-Soul speeds down the street, blinding everyone to with his headlights.

Though her approach is gradual, Davis makes clear right from the start: This is no ordinary world, and this will not be an ordinary story. “Scows” roam the sky—it’s not immediately evident what a scow is, but there they are, hovering—and robots live alongside humans. There’s even a family of robots in a duplex on Mary’s street. Time plays an outsized role—or perhaps time truly does play the biggest role, even outside this street where “the clocks [keep] ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it.”
Davis also grapples with issues present in the world—the actual world we live in—and she particularly lingers on what it means to be female. At the end of the opening chapter, a first-person narrator (whose identity is never revealed) describes Mary and Cindy XA, her robot neighbor, swinging together on the first day of school, while Eddie is still missing. The narrator confides, “I think the robot was trying to warn her about what was going to happen. I think this because the story of what was going to happen is also my story, the story of girls everywhere.”
This declaration is open to plenty of interpretations. Is Duplex also telling the story of girls in our world, outside of this odd street, where time and space connect like a hinge on the door of a duplex?
And then there are schoolgirls in a parallel narrative, who pop up in chapters throughout the book, gathering together to gossip and attempting to explain the world to each other. “We were sitting on the porch stoop one night in late summer, trading cards. This was what you did if you were a girl—it was your calling.” One character in particular, a haughty girl named Janice, leads the pack by telling fantastical stories. She tells them about “The Rain of Beads”—a parable of how robots and humans came to intermingle—and declares that “time was different now. It used to be sadder.”
Speaking of Janice in an interview, Davis says, “Of course every girl alive…has grown up in the presence of some older bossy girl who likes nothing better than to dispense wisdom, to provide histories designed to scare or astonish, to hold all the younger girls in thrall. When I was writing Duplex it occurred to me that my own understanding of storytelling had been handed down by an ever-changing troop of such older girls.”
Part of the genius of Duplex is that Davis doesn’t push any alternate agenda. A wide range of interpretations feels welcome, and at the heart of the book is the lifelong story of Mary and Eddie, told with care and in beautiful sentences. A reader must work hard both to perceive a larger meaning from page-to-page and to understand what’s happening on the level of plot, character, and setting (e.g., is it 1950 or is it a robot future?). Questions inevitably pop up. Are the robots a commentary on our technology-dependent society? Are all women living the story of girls everywhere—and if so, what is that story? The answers to these questions aren’t in the pages of this brilliant novel, and we don’t read to find out; we read because Davis has created a world with language unlike any other, and also like our own. - Elizabeth Word Gutting 


You're walking your dog in a suburb that may or may not exist in this dimension. The dog whines. You ignore him. Anyway, you're too busy looking out for that sexy, evil sorcerer. Suddenly, a gray rabbit appears, and you realize: the world is ending.
That is not a direct quote from Duplex, the latest novel from Kathryn Davis. Her sentences need a bit too much explanation. But there are plenty of passages I could cite that are equally bewildering. Really, I can't remember the last time I read a book so disorienting. Half the time I didn't know what was happening. Who was speaking. Whether or not they actually existed. But I can tell you, reading this book is a blast.
Duplex is a traditional love story tucked inside an adult fairy tale, wrapped in science fiction. I think there are two planets in the novel. Possibly they're the same world. Possibly they're neighbors. In the end, it doesn't really matter.
World number one is like a 1950s suburb. Kids play in the street. Neighbors gossip. Teenagers find sex confusing. So far, so good. However, there are also robots, but they're mostly like everybody else: discontented. Also, there's a playboy sorcerer, who will make your dreams come true for the measly price of your soul. And the suburb, as far as I can tell, operates in space and time like Brigadoon.
World number two: it appears to be our own. There, we track a group of schoolgirls at different stages of life. The head girl, Janice, is a bossy know-it-all. She's that older girl on the playground who keeps the little ones enthralled with dubious wisdom. But the stories Janice tells actually hearken back to that first world I mentioned — in fact, the two worlds may exist on top of one another, hence the novel's title. As you read, you realize it might even be possible to pass from one world to the next.
Thankfully, the laws of quantum mechanics do not power Duplex's magnetism. Instead, it is Davis's beautiful prose, her psychological awareness. She writes, about one of her robot characters, "The act of pretending to get older had managed to confer a kind of dignity on the robot, making it hard to remember that in actuality it was the size and shape of a needle."
Speed-readers, skip sentences at your peril — if only because something will happen that won't make sense for fifty pages, then turn out to be an essential narrative hinge. Halfway through, I put the book down for two days. When I picked it up again, I had to start all over just to understand what the hell was going on. Still, I wouldn't take back one minute of reading. Sometimes really good company, the interesting, mind-expanding kind, leaves you scratching your head. - Rosecrans Baldwin

Kathryn Davis’s novel Duplex reads like a waking dream. Davis’s sentences channel that half-state between consciousness and unconsciousness, that foggy place where you realize you’re waking up but are still enraptured by the vivid imagery that’s been parading through your head all night. And just like those dreams, one feels compelled to attempt to make sense of it.

From the very first page, Davis introduces us to a futuristic suburb that at first glance doesn’t seem to be all that different from 1950s America: it’s a summer evening, boys are playing baseball in the street, girls are trading stickers on porches, and parents are sipping highballs and playing canasta. Davis’s approach to introducing the various sci-fi/fantasy elements throughout the book is to operate under the assumption that nothing is out of the ordinary. For example, rather than draw attention to the fact that there are actual robot families in this world, she nonchalantly introduces them in the first chapter: “Everyone knew the family inside number 37 were robots. Mr. XA, Mrs. XA, Cindy XA, Carol XA – when you saw them outside the house they looked like people.” And when it comes time to explain the differences between robots and humans, she matter-of-factly delineates between the two: “The passage of time made no sense to the robots; their farsightedness extended backwards and forwards in ways that bore no relationship to it. They could see everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen – the only thing they couldn’t do was change what they saw. The robots needed us to change things . . .” This narrative style is in keeping with the dreamlike quality of the prose — Davis is counting on our accepting everything we’re told as fact, as if there’s no reason why things should be any other way.

Such an authoritative tone makes it easy to draw lines from Davis to a character named Janice, a young woman who tells fantastical stories to a rapt audience of neighborhood girls several times over the course of the book. It’s unclear where Janice and the girls exist in the timeline of the novel, but like Davis, Janice brooks no argument (or really any interruption at all) when it comes to her stories, all of which are framed as histories: “The thing I’m talking about happened long ago, Janice said. Not as long ago as the Rain of Beads but a thousand times worse. People used to think the Horsewomen were involved, only this was another group. They were older and they were human girls and they had a leader – they called themselves the Aquanauts.” These tales serve to establish a common past that characters refer to in the other chapters of the novel — references to the Rain of Beads and the Aquanauts are invoked offhandedly, in some cases before we’ve even read the pertinent story, and it’s assumed we understand the allusion. It’s a canny decision on Davis’s part, as Duplex is not a lengthy novel, and Janice’s stories function as pseudo-myths in their own separate chapters while simultaneously creating a shared history that helps the author’s world-building endeavor along.

The main plot of Duplex revolves around Mary and Eddie, childhood sweethearts who we watch grow up and apart. While there are several passages from their point-of-view, much of what we learn of them is pieced together through other characters’ eyes, most prominently those of Marjorie Vicks, elementary school teacher and Mary’s duplex neighbor during her youth. Marjorie has a fling with the enigmatic sorcerer Body-without-Soul, owner of the mysterious Woodard estate in town, and then watches as Mary grows up and ends up marrying the sorcerer instead of Eddie — for in his youth, Eddie had surrendered his own soul up to the sorcerer in exchange for a successful pro baseball career and was never the same afterward. Eventually, Eddie gets injured in a game and recovers in a water tower for an indeterminate amount of time before returning home to his parents and, much later, recovering his soul at the end of his life in a convalescent home. Mary has a daughter named Blue-Eyes with the sorcerer (in an appropriately bizarre fashion), struggles to relate to her as she grows older, and sends her off to a private school, while Ms. Vicks ends up meeting Blue-Eyes at that private school at the end of a long, surreal journey she takes (and also passes by Eddie’s recovery room on the way there, though on the opposite side of a tall wall dividing them).

Attempting to write even that cursory plot summary felt like trying to explain a particularly vivid dream to someone else rationally, and the plot certainly doesn’t seem to be the point in Duplex. Going into it expecting a typical dramatic structure is as futile as attempting to impose such strictures on your dreams. In some ways, the absence of that familiar backbone is what makes the novel so absorbing — I know I wouldn’t have been so set on parsing this strange world if the plot had proceeded along familiar lines. Davis mashes up the realistic with the fantastic in sometimes hilarious fashion — robots can make themselves look like coins and needles to humans and can see past, present and future all at once, but get upset when humans don’t remember that they can’t experience life in the same way that we do: “When a robot is hurt by human insensitivity – when the human fails to remember that robots never sleep, for example – then the robot might not bother to modulate its voice or make it sound like the product of a human voice box. Cindy’s voice still sounded human but it also sounded as if it had gotten trapped in a box made of metal on a planet in another galaxy and was beating against the sides of the box trying to get out.” But the blend never feels contrived, and I think this has something to do with the underlying system of recurring imagery that Davis subtly deploys in and around the plot’s outlines. Burning haystacks, schoolgirls in blue dresses, coins, stickers and many other little details keep showing up, not so much to help orientate you amid the swirl of points-of-view and timelines as to heighten the overall oneiric tone of the story. Their repetition feels natural, waves advancing and receding over and over, adding to the hypnotic effects of Davis’s language. It’s easy to get lost in the world she’s created.

And that’s really the only problem I had with Duplex. I was so enthralled with unraveling and absorbing the details of this weird, wonderful fictional world that I had trouble relating to any of the characters in it. The fragmentary plot isn’t quite coherent enough to form any real connection to Mary and Eddie. Their brief interactions with each other early in the book feel stilted, and then we don’t see them together again for most of the rest of the novel. It feels like Davis missed the chance to humanize them more fully, especially given the antithetical presence of those loveless robots and the soulless sorcerer — the innate bond Mary and Eddie are supposed to have is repeatedly mentioned, but I never saw it on display anywhere and thus never truly felt it. As a result, I reached the end of the book dazzled by Davis’s vast imagination and beautifully expressive language, but largely unaffected by the characters’ journeys.

As I mentioned at the outset, Duplex’s rich world provides fertile ground for the curious reader — though if you’re looking for specific, concrete interpretations, you might be disappointed. Fortunately, I don’t think this is the only approach that Davis set out to foster. I found it more pleasant to just let the shifting patterns and imagery wash over me, until by the end of the novel I felt not unlike the Aquanaut who got swept back to shore in one of Janice’s stories: exhilarated, exhausted, and more than a little dismayed to find myself in the same world I’d so utterly left behind while reading. - Nathan Weatherford


Reading Kathryn Davis’ Duplex is an exercise in letting go: of reality, of objective understanding, of our modern, obsessive need for facts. The world of this novel is both brilliantly strange and gnawingly familiar, though it resembles a dream more than it does our reality. Davis has created a place wherein the boundaries between two people are as flexible as a hinge and as thin as the walls of a duplex, a place where human beings live alongside robots and sorcerers.
These species form a complicated social strata — a fluid matrix of envy and desire and transient, precarious ownership. Each group wants the very thing they cannot have. The humans envy the robots’ economy and agelessness. Though they can take human form, the robots are tiny, silver needles that make a clipping noise as they fly and settle in ceiling fixtures to “roost and recharge.” While the robots are prescient — able to see everything that has already happened and everything that will — they’re surprisingly impotent: The robots need humans “to change things, the same way we needed them to think for us.” The spectacular powers of the sorcerers, meanwhile, know no bounds. Sorcerer Walter, also known as Body-Without-Soul, “could make things appear or he could make them vanish.” But because he is soulless, he cannot experience love.
Even human girlhood is hotly-contested ground. Teenage girls figure prominently in the creation stories of this world: brutal, mythical tales in which they are broken and ultimately transformed, their bodies made into beads and centaurs and immortal, vengeful creatures of the ocean. If Duplex is in part about possession — both of the self and the small shell of earth in which it is housed — girls are most often gypped, displaced and suspected. Take Mary, for instance, one of the novel’s two central humans, whose agency is often revoked and whose dreams — of motherhood and of love with her childhood sweetheart, Eddie — are continually thwarted. Eddie and Mary’s romance is an ordinary love story that takes place under extraordinary circumstances. In the battle for power, for soulfulness, one of them will lose the very thing that makes them human.
Power, soulfulness, desire: weighty themes, and in the hands of a lesser writer Duplex could feel overbearing. But Davis explores each character with democracy, compassion and subtlety. “When the sorcerer looked at the street,” she writes, “he saw it crawling with souls like the earth with worms. It was no secret that even the lowliest of the unruly, uncontainable beings living there could partake of love’s mystery, and his envious rage knew no bounds.” When a family of robots moves to Mary and Eddie’s neighborhood, some of the residents petition to oust them. But a glimpse into the minds of the robots reveals the transition is no easier for them:
“Food in particular disgusted them, as did the fact that humans ate it, a sight they had to learn to endure. It was with something approaching horror that they would observe our great mouths creaking open to reveal strands of moistly gleaming saliva and twin rows of white teeth bearing down on a piece of some dead creature’s flesh that would burst apart as they watched, releasing streams of juice.” 
As the novel continues, the boundaries between these characters become increasingly fragile, even permeable. Davis plays brilliantly on the claustrophobia of American suburbia, and the duplex houses in Mary and Eddie’s neighborhood serve as an ideal site to explore the proximity that both separates and interweaves their occupants. Duplex is obsessed with halving and doubling, with hinges and doors, with places where you can go “forward and back with equal ease.” Some characters split into doubles; others seem to live multiple lives.
It is a book that pursues ideas more than it does narrative clarity, and readers who are “hot for facts,” as one character puts it, may crave more coherence. I count myself, to some extent, in this group. The novel gives us plenty of titillating whats, but few whys or hows. Though the dynamics between species are described early, I hoped to see them evolve more than they did. The enmity between the sorcerers and the robots is largely unexplored, and the consequences of soulfulness — and soullessness — are alluded to only impressionistically. With their all-American privilege and 1950s ambitions — Eddie becomes a baseball player, while Mary’s main purview is the home — the human protagonists seem somewhat wooden. And while Davis’ language is exquisitely sensory, for example, when the sorcerer touches a schoolteacher “she felt the life inside her leap up from everywhere, shocking, like a hatch of mayflies,” her meaning can feel tantalizingly out of reach.
But concrete meaning clearly isn’t what Duplex is after. This novel’s world continually subverts our expectations; like a dream, it creates and recreates itself before our eyes. “The heavens, the earth, the underworld — human beings have always needed divisions like that to know where they are and where they’re going,” Davis writes. Does the novel take place in the past or the future? Is it our world, or something like it? The answer seems to be both and neither: Duplex exists in the spaces between, and readers who don’t mind gray areas will very likely enjoy their stay. - Chloe Krug Benjamin


Trying to explain this novel is like trying to tell you about some weird dream I had: whether or not you were in it, no matter how crazy it was or poignant or whatever else attracts you to a good story, my retelling is gonna suck. While I hit on the plot, storyline (which, for Duplex, fits into about the same level of sense-making as most people’s dreams) and big key aspect, I ultimately have to leave out the colors and senses that made it so compelling, no matter how surreal it was. That said: this book is one you have to read for yourself, but here’s the best way I can relate it to you anyway.
It’s a different time. Maybe 1950, maybe 2050 or 2500, I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. Fair warning: if details like that matter to you anyway, you’re going to struggle through this novel. A lot has changed: Robots are living next door, so close even, they share duplex walls with some of the most ordinary families in town. Not that it wasn’t a shock when the robots first moved in – after all, when out of the privacy of their own homes, they do don the guise of people. At first, people moved away or fought against robots living next door (think A Raisin in the Sun), but after so many came and it seemed every neighborhood had a robot or two, and as it turns out the robots weren’t that bad of neighbors (they’re Type A freaks when it comes to keeping human social standards, it turns out), people just got used to it, more or less.
Still, a lot of things haven’t changed. Most notably, girls. Girls continue dressing in saddle shoes and peter-pan collars, writing their own versions of novels about horses named “Lightning Bolt” or “Black Dancer,” they still fall in love with the boy next door in grade school and become high-school sweethearts, expecting love to last forever. But, in the case of main girl Mary and Eddie, whom everyone expects to be her starter husband, things get more complicated. Girls now have to chose between mere mortals and Sorcerers, or Bodies-without-Souls.
Yes, there are sorcerers and there are robots and they’re basically found on every page of the novel, but please don’t get turned off thinking this is some sci-fi shtick. It’s the most base, human book I’ve read this year. The beauty of it is Davis’ writing; without her way with words, this story couldn’t work. It’s the little tiny details she points out to you, like a girls’ mousy hair and unpolished shoes, that make you hungry to get to the next page. It’s the way she makes every character, most notable, Cindy the prom-queen, the only daughter in house number 37 and the first robot to attend the local school, into a complex girl who gets hurt when people ask about her appetite (she doesn’t have one) and whose husband (a human) catches her often crying herself to sleep because she’s so upset about not having a soul.
In fact, it’s easier to relate Davis’ novel (at least this one, since I unfortunately have not read her other novels – The Thin Place and Versailles are now on my short-list) to a story your grandmother told you long ago, or magical-realists in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez than sci-fi guys like H.G. Wells or Orson Scott Card. There’s still mention of fairies, magic hinting at the seams of every sentence – there’s simply robots and futuristic devices as well. I firmly believe if Marquez had grown up in the digital age and wrote a novel for his daughter, it would look a lot like Duplex.
Storytelling is passed on, even in the book. In a parallel time to Mary, Eddie and Cindy’s, (again, it could be 5 years later, 500 years later, maybe even 5 months prior – it doesn’t matter), hopeless storyteller and the closest thing to the novel’s narrator Janice passes on the stories of Mary, Cindy and other girls, their card games encounters and love affairs with robots and sorcerers, to the other girls in her neighborhood, starting with her peers, moving to the girls she watches as the neighborhood ages. Janice not only introduces stories and context to the world Davis has created, she guides the reader in what to ask for and expect. For instance, in reply to the girls pestering for names in the stories she’s telling, Janice says: “No names. Why do you always want to hear names? Does that bush have a name? Does that tree?…  If I told you the names it would make your brains explode.”  It’s the sense of only telling part of the story, only what we can handle. Davis’ novel has parts incomplete, parts we never quite understand even at the end or after a re-reading, but ultimately, we have the stories we need, the sights we need to see into this world she’d dreamt up. And it’s a beautiful sight.  - Kati Heng


“Like most writers, I have one particular thing I can’t stop thinking about, wondering about, and in my case it’s the animating spirit of a thing, what we also call the soul.”
Kathryn Davis, “Versailles,” reading group guide

The story begins on a suburban street with sycamore trees planted at regular intervals, down which a slim, attractive schoolteacher named Miss Vicks, who is about 50, takes her dachshund on a walk. You read, “She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn’t have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.”

And so you add “regal bearing” to the picture you see of Miss Vicks, and, loosely, an era — the late ’50s? the ’60s? early ’70s? — time and place forming as you read along, and then comes a phrase that makes the forming stutter. It’s after dinner, “when the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky.”

Scow? Isn’t that a type of boat, a barge of some sort? Scows in the sky? But now the dog is sniffing around one of the trees the way dogs do, so you think to yourself, maybe “scow” is another word for blimp, like the Goodyear blimp that passed over your street in the early 1960s, and you feel the melancholy you experienced as a 10-year-old girl sitting on your front porch on a summer night, reading messages the blimp flashed along its side that had nothing and everything to do with you. And Miss Vicks feels her childhood too, feels “all the Miss Vickses that had ever been” layered inside her “like tree rings around heartwood.” The chapter is called “Body-­without-Soul,” the book is called “Duplex,” and you’ve lived in a duplex so you think, “Oh, I know what this book is about.”

There are parents who drink highballs and play canasta as darkness wells up and the fireflies come out. There are kids named Eddie, Mary, Carol, Roy, who wear T-shirts and plaid shorts, trade cards and stickers they keep in cigar boxes, play ball in the street; and when a car comes speeding toward them with headlights blazing, the kids yell “Heads up!” and scatter. Now the year is fixed in your head. It’s 1966 for sure. The only difference is the kids on your street yelled “Car!”

And then you read this: “The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul.” And you find out not only does Miss Vicks know him, they are romantically involved, and he can make things vanish or “vibrate at unprecedented frequencies,” including her privates, he can sow fear inside anything, and then you read that he can fit his entire hand inside her. Time stutters. What? His entire hand what?

You read the phrase four times, trying to catch up, the way you tried to catch up when you were a kid and Henry, the teenager from next door, told a bunch of you a story about his finger and a girl. Finger? Girl? What? Then a flood of understanding horrified you, shamed and excited you, trailed you back into the house to the kitchen where dinner was ready, where your chicken potpie was waiting to be pierced with your fork and you stared at it.

Oh. A scow is not a blimp. “Real woman” means something else entirely. And though he drives a car, and his name turns out to be Walter, the sorcerer is not a real man. He looks at the street but he doesn’t see the kids, he sees it “crawling with souls like the earth with worms. It was no secret that even the lowliest of the unruly, uncontainable beings living there could partake of love’s mystery, and his envious rage knew no bounds.”

The real and the unreal are laminated so tightly in “Duplex” you find yourself suddenly lost; you don’t know where or when this book takes place, you don’t know what this book is about at all. And that is how it takes you in.

When I finished “Duplex” I had the unshakable feeling that I’d only read half of the book, and the other half was still in there and if I wanted to finish it, I’d need to read it again. I wasn’t wrong. By then I’d fallen in love with Davis’s writing, what it did to me, that combination of horror and excitement that spilled out of the book, into my past, into the now, into everything around me. The novel is packed with ordinary things (tuna casserole, skinned knees, hot water heaters, red barrettes) and extraordinary things (robots the size of needles, “dactilo ports” in restrooms, those flying scows), and then there are things that fall somewhere in between: the word “aquanaut,” a purse-shaped thing called a “Mary bean” that can drift across the ocean to other continents, a convent named after a girl who was roasted on a brazier.

The melding of real and unreal spilled into my real time and place in an uncanny way: at the exact moment the crickets are rubbing their legs together in the book, “chchch, chchchch, chhhh,” the crickets outside my window started up. I step outside to have a cigarette, light it, turn the page — and the sorcerer is lighting a cigarette for someone. In the next room a friend sings a line from “Brigadoon,” the exact lyric I’ve been reading in the book with no idea what it was from. At times it felt as if the book were moving things around me like a planchette on a Ouija board. Few books have given me this sort of real-time thrill, the kind that trailed me out of the theater after seeing the movie about a girl in the pocket of that freakiest of changes, from kid to adolescent, who is suddenly able to light an entire gymnasium full of promgoers on fire with her mind while wearing a pink gown covered in pig’s blood. Davis is more subtle in her understanding of the kind of horror girls really need. It’s extremely rare, but there is plenty of it in “Duplex” and I’m grateful for every word.

“I wanted to write about them in such a way that the reader would end up thinking about the animating spirit, about whatever animates any container, whether a body or a building, that makes it so absolutely what it is and nothing else.” That’s Davis writing about a different beautiful book of hers, “Versailles.” It’s a novel about Marie Antoinette, another girl who makes a freaky historical transition, and Davis is able to animate her too, making her completely alive in a way you can’t expect, even if you know just how her story ends. That animating spirit, that soul, is alive in “Duplex,” a story that is almost impossible to summarize without damaging the experience. It wormholes through the real and unreal in a way that is always compelling even if it doesn’t make immediate sense to the top of the mind, the human experience always recognizable even in a world that feels like a much-needed nightmare version of “Brigadoon.”

“Two weary hunters lost their way. And this is what happened, the strange thing that happened . . .”

As you read along you realize one of the weary hunters is you, my dear, and the other weary hunter is also you. And strange things keep happening and do not stop. So, when you are lost in the uncanny woods of this astonishing, double-hinged book, just keep reading, and remember to look up. Kathryn Davis knows right where you are.  

- Lynda Barry

The experience of reading Kathryn Davis has been compared, more than once, to dreaming, though her books aren’t “dreamy” per se. They’re possessed, rather, by the kind of dream logic in which things are familiar yet discombobulatingly off. Over the course of six novels, Davis has flitted from the lyrical to the surreal to magic realism to, in her latest, Duplex, literary science fiction.

Duplex has a series of recognizable events though calling the totality of them a plot is like saying that a lava lamp has a narrative arc. “You can have all the information in the world,” muses the narrator knowingly, “and what good does it do you?”

On a suburban street, groups of girls trade cards on doorsteps while absentee parents drink highballs indoors. One of the girls is sweet, dull Mary, whose presumed destiny to marry her childhood sweetheart, a baseball star named Eddie, is upended when Eddie vanishes into another dimension after the high school prom.

Another girl, Janice, regales the group with tales of local legends: the Rain of Beads, the Descent of the Aquanauts, the Four Horsewomen — all of which involve girls getting tricked, trapped or transmogrified. Among Janice’s audience is a (sometimes) first-person narrator who informs us that the story we’re reading is her story, but also “the story of girls everywhere.”

Robots have taken up residence on the block, and though everyone knows this they politely pretend not to notice. Even the characters who aren’t ostensibly robots seem to be playing roles, however. At the prom, Mary leans her head on Eddie’s shoulder because “That was what the girlfriend was supposed to do.” Overhead, airships called scows are like gods, yet they also perform banal functions like dealing with the dog poop scooped up by humans below. Periodically, a silver-grey car appears on the street and everybody scatters. The car belongs to the sorcerer, Walter Woodard, the only descendent of a local family that earned a fortune trafficking drugs.

The sorcerer (aka Body-without-Soul) romances the local schoolteacher, Miss Vicks, for a time before eventually marrying Mary. There’s talk of a prophecy involving a child half human, half robot, but it’s unclear if Mary’s sour, preternaturally adult daughter Blue Eyes, who started life as a discarded toy bear, is it.

Duplex has a sinister, end-of-days-ish feel though at one point Mary notes the failure of all prophecies foretelling such. Time has multi-dimensional, textural and even emotional qualities: it stretches like taffy or feels “sad” (though it still “heals all”). Paradoxes abound: the robots have the ability to see everything that has happened and ever will happen, yet they need humans “to change things.” There’s a nod to Lewis Carroll in the grey hares that suddenly start appearing everywhere; when people disappear, however, it’s down wormholes, not rabbit holes.

At one point, the narrator says, “Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn’t emerge until there’d been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together” and it’s hard not to imagine Davis having a chuckle at our expense; if anything, we’re less certain what Duplex is “about” at the end than we were at the beginning.

The downside to building a novel on such amorphous, shifting ground is that narrative stalwarts like anticipation or suspense are necessarily cast aside. Consequently, continuing to read Duplex sometimes feels like a matter of will, not compulsion. Stick with it, however, and you get as your reward Davis’s slyly funny, frequently mesmerizing, sui generis writing. This is a novel about the journey, not the destination, so it helps to stay flexible and not ask when you’ll get there. -

Emily Donaldson

Seven years ago—I was in England when Kathryn Davis’s sixth novel, The Thin Place, was released stateside; I was desperately homesick, I even had a fever. The fever broke in a barber’s chair down the street from my lodgings. I remember the barber’s stupefaction: having to give me, a pale American college sophomore, practically a tourist, a haircut while sweat dripped off my nose; his asking, “You want to come back for this? You want to lie down a spell?” And my reply, in my frail, affected accent: “No, no, the fresh air’s done me good.”

I had read Mary Guterson’s review of The Thin Place in The Believer, a magazine I bought at Waterstones on Sidney Street, along the main slim thoroughfare in old Cambridge. (I was hugely devoted to the Believer ethos, back then. With my head flooding pain, I walked the two miles into town just for the magazine.) Guterson’s praise was enthusiastic, even reverent; she seemed unironically mesmerized by Davis’s novel, quoted from it at length in the 400 or so words she had to fit a review, and left me utterly, urgently convinced of its charms. She described the novel’s florid cast of characters, fifty-plus people, animals, and plants: girls, lichen, beavers, cats, glaciers; she described how Davis knitted the other-worldly consciousness of each into a language of great sensuousness, dexterity and resonance. A thin place, so the novel explained, is where the material world and spirit worlds touch. I was starving in England, gin-bloated and celibate, waiting to slip into the dream of the possessed, the traveler, the interloper—but nothing worked except money, and I didn’t have that. I had a fever. For the island of miserableness my tiny room became, I may as well have been in the tropics, shipwrecked and fussing over coconuts as dengue corkscrewed through my joints.

While in England, I read American Psycho, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the New York Trilogy to whittle down the semester breaks, and Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and Bill Bryson for class. Though they often left me reeling they did not sate. Although broke (and I have so many book-buying stories that hinge on “although broke . . . “), I wanted The Thin Place shipped over; I thought it must be tonic, to slip inside the story, to be in its wilderness, to have its lights wash over my face and eyes, to take on its sensory apparatus as one does a diving bell. I wanted the book’s mystics to hold hands over my delirium. Want in another country makes of the foreign lands a chasm. I had to wait until I got home in June.
In the meantime, I read Lucy Ellmann’s review in the Times, a spot of dog’s vomit that I still wince at, keep wincing over, now that I’ve brought it up on my laptop. So this was the way with my study abroad: sightseeing taught me nothing, I was unreceptive to major experiences involving train rides and architecture, there was no apex, no crises, only flat poverty throughout England’s rain-gray winter months, and then her neon green spring; none of the place-names stuck; I stayed indoors and fussed over American book reviews. For a book whose first chapter was all that I’d read (it remains available at the Times), I was struck by the silliness and pomposity of Ellmann’s salty-sweet harangue, how every accolade balanced on a barb. She had no praise that was not glib fawning, that could then eats it own tail and burp in delight. Reading it was like swallowing marshmallows with glass thumbed inside:
... “The Thin Place,” Davis’s sixth novel, is that rare, brave and original thing: an honest and energetic glimpse into an author’s head. It’s like being holed up with some crazy old nun. She’s never dull but won’t stop talking, filling every sentence to the brim with observations and reflections. Sometimes they get out of hand.”...
... Her inclusiveness sometimes verges on gush: curtains blowing in a summer breeze are “heart-wrenching” she claims. (Me, I only cry about bedspreads.) But “pendent from the tip of every single thing in the world, a diamond” — about the aftereffects of a storm — is heart-wrenchingly cutesy...
... Davis has landed herself with far too many townsfolk to describe, and resorts to the currently popular but brutal technique of allowing only one or two characteristics per person. Helen likes “The Forsyte Saga” and hates the woman who runs her nursing home. Richard, the rector, still finds his wife sexually appealing and, when he’s not mulling over the meaning of Pentecost (zzzzz), they play tennis...
I quote at length from Ellmann’s energetic review because it’s a tremendous example of misreading. Of withholding, even, from its audience. When Ellmann compares Davis’s narration to that of a “crazy old nun,” she may be alluding to Julian of Norwich, a 12th Century English mystic whose presence is interspersed throughout the novel. When Ellmann writes about Davis’s tendency to “gush,” she’s dismissing, tout court, the sentimental charge of the narrator, the cumulative effect of taking on the voices and bathos of generations of life-forms, of setting motion to a whole cosmology—a folly full up of joy. When Ellmann notes the “far too many townsfolk” for Davis to describe, she’s missing an integral structural component of the novel (and much else of Davis’s oeuvre), its reliance on the conventions of fairytales. Little Red Riding Hood has the garment and the task; the three pigs have their homes; Goldilocks, her hair and porridge; Hansel and Gretel, gullibility borne of neglect. The Thin Place‘s first paragraph has every cue and clue as to its telescoping dimensions, its black holes and blooms:
There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake. One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall. This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they’d seen, what they’d done or failed to do. The dead souls no longer wore gowns. They’d gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.

Three girlfriends. An unspeakable century. Ghosts slipped out of their shrouds. When Ellmann falls asleep during the discussion of the Pentecost (“zzzzz”—and by Christ! how did the Sunday Book Review editor not pass on this smarminess?), she’s alerting readers where her empathy and imagination ends. The miraculous eludes her.

So I rehearse old news for several reasons. The first—basic agitation. Davis’s new novel comes out this September, and I hope to see the Paper of Record get it right. Second—I revisit a former life because I’m in a very different moment. I’m in a Miami condominium, for one thing, thin-hipped and tan. Third—the new novel is succor.
Davis’s novel Duplex, out this September from Graywolf Press, continues her examination of the miraculous in everyday life. That reads like lazy review-speak, but the domain in Davis’s writing is entirely her own, entirely enchanting, and entirely heartbreaking. I put down the novel feeling abraded, as though I had been caught in a wave that dumped me to a rocky sea floor. Such is its turmoil, its profusion.
Davis suffuses life—in this narrative, a slice of suburbia very near the sea—with miracles: robots, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, the apocalypse; and all of it enigmatically and understatedly so:
Everyone knew the family inside number 37 were robots. Mr. XA, Mrs. XA, Cindy XA, Carol XA—when you saw them outside the house they looked like people. Carol had been in Miss Vick’s class the previous year and she had been an excellent if uninspired student; Cindy would be in her class starting tomorrow. The question of how to teach—or even whether to teach—a robot came up from time to time among the teachers. No one had a good answer.
Reality is exquisitely askew: people remain morally dubious but not necessarily unkind, and, like Davis’s miracles, they illuminate one another as much as they disappoint. That is, in the complex and freewheeling interplay among fairytale, Biblical allusion, folk wisdom, and genre tropes that make up her latest novel (including but not limited to theories of time and space, theology, ecosophy, horror, and feminism), the elements combine to situate melancholy as the medium of existence. Melancholy and perhaps yearning. No amount of magic, no host of angels, no Aquanauts, no curiously intelligent dogs—nothing—will prevent humans, in their great mystery and grave dignity, from the embarrassments of poor choices, from the ravages of time. We come to our reward urgently and resigned, we fail each other, we are loved anyway, and honored; we attain a clanking broken grace, often much too late to enjoy it, or a grace so wondrous as to be incomprehensible. However, despite the logic of vengeance that permeates this text, and its violence against women, and its floods, it isn’t a story from the Old Testament. It is a Grimm dark forest, a Wonderland, and takes a secular pleasure in imagining our consciousness strobing outside the confines of faith.
A case in point: Miss Vicks, a central character at the novel’s beginning, a grade school teacher in love with a sorcerer, dies without our knowing, even as we follow her into a purgatory of sorts, steeped along a great wall, then welcomed into a foreboding hotel. She is in this life—in her home, house number 49, at the end of a Sycamore-lined street—and then she takes off on a photographer’s horse—she comes to a strange river and crosses via ferry—the other side is a long trek through indifferent rains, along the wall too tall to climb. Her journey intersects with the near-death of a famous baseball player, Eddie, her former student. Neither quite understands their passage into death, how they could escape back to life, and Davis means for the reader, I think, to share in their confusion. Things do not add up. Parts have gone missing. Eddie, holed-up for some time in a hospital, seemingly for years on the “disabled list,” realizes his situation resembles imprisonment. He’s been swapped out for a princess: he lies in a bed in a medieval turret and receives blow-jobs from a physical therapist, and watches the progress of the team he failed on the “console,” the novel’s universe’s version of TV. As Eddie makes his escape from his prison tower, Miss Vicks, slumped against the wall, concurrently remembers when he was a boy, copying off the test of his sweetheart, Mary. “There had been an accident—she strove to remember. Every night all summer long the boys played baseball in the street. From time to time a car would appear. Not so many cars back then, but even so everyone had to be careful.” What Miss Vicks remembers is the night her lover abducted Eddie and stole his soul. She knows it but never admits it to herself. She atones in this twilight. She frees them both.
Duplex—as the title suggests—is about how we live split lives, separate yet parallel; how we live alone; how we search for the doors to open to our better halves, the halves we hear knocking on stairs just through the wall. The central love triangle in the novel, among Eddie, the future baseball star, and Mary, his artsy high school sweetheart, and the sorcerer Walter, walls out the truth from its characters. Their actions make little sense to themselves and only when they are older, so old they’re in nursing homes, do they understand the consequences. If that’s even what they do. Before Walter leaves Miss Vicks by stealing Eddie’s soul and seducing Mary (tearing the story-book romance of the high-school sweethearts asunder), the school teacher confronts the sorcerer about his promiscuity: “‘I’m not like you,’ he told her. . . . When the sorcerer looked at the street he saw it crawling with souls like the earth with worms. It was no secret even the lowliest of the unruly, uncontainable beings living there could partake of love’s mystery, and his envious rage knew no bounds.”
Duplex‘s fairytale affect compresses character psychology. The presence of the diabolical makes states of love and hate eternal vexations, their tides shallow yet unceasing, with little by way of definition or genesis to guide readers except the child’s pact that magic comes in unseen packets, carried by good witches and bad. We know the devil is compelled by devilish wiles. Having no soul (and WHO IS THAT? WHAT IS THAT?—to quote from Davis’s Versailles) makes him stir crazy and obtuse. His victims are limited by the shame of their lifespans. Compelled to reproduce, and to care for their off-spring, they waste a lot of time standing around feeling too helpless about this life to consider what came before, and too demoralized to look forward to what comes after. In a Bookslut interview, Davis remarks on a childhood preoccupation with the soul:
I went to church with my parents and didn’t understand what a soul was, but I thought about it a lot, and about the fact that I was alive. I was obsessed with the idea that there was something about me that might continue after I died, and it upset me. I became kind of an insomniac, worried about the idea of forever and ever. That the soul would endure forever just seemed horrifying. It’s something I have thought about obsessively my whole life long, and I’m really interested in what it is that gives us life, that makes us not just be a table.
A table, in Davis’s tales, at least has a purpose. Walter, also known as Body-without-Soul, is aimless, pegged to a dying planet. He’s pathetic. Though he must have a long life—eons to fritter away on cruel jokes and black looks—maybe it’s also true that he when he’s gone, he’s gone. Pulped and gored and gone.
So Davis is a great believer in souls: not as an abstract literary element, but as a specific (if still amorphous) trait of the human species as articulated in religious thinking—as finite objects, agents in history, discreet, with heft, and presence, and personality. Even if people are mistaken, if they are cruel, or ignorant—they remain holy, consequential. Her novel Versailles, about the life and death of Marie Antoinette, famously begins: “My soul is going on a trip. I want to talk about her. I want to talk about her. Why would anyone want to talk about anything else?” And the next two-hundred pages are a gorgeous portrait of Antoinette’s young soul, talking about herself, her whims, her sensuality, pinned to infinity by the rays of the Sun King’s court. The soul is intrinsically storied: it must be the record of what passed, what was witnessed. The soul takes the record—just as the future takes our words—to a place we cannot fathom. Antoinette’s soul watches the executioner guillotine her body’s head off. She wanders back to her beloved palace, to its Hall of Mirrors where she can no longer see herself. The soul doesn’t say what happens next. The book ends. Maybe the soul anticipated silence all along.
Davis’s last novel, The Thin Place, is about a small New England town where the material world seemed to have unpeeled a little, to go soft and sad and vibrant, and connected with the spirit world. Varennes is like a lot of places in America, with too many flies and a lake drying up, only it has Mees Kipp too, a grouchy middle school student who can bring animals and people back from the dead. She loses this gift in a fateful church shooting. The narrative, as mentioned above, is interspersed with vignettes of the life of Julian of Norwich, a 12^th Century English mystic, a woman apart from society, taken in the embrace of earth and sky, who in her sickness reflected on the suffering of Christ. The overtures of Christian mysticism that suffuse Davis’s writing are apiece with her respect for nature. Her fourth novel, The Walking Tour, is a paranoid picaresque through the Welsh countryside told from the point-of-view of a disenfranchised daughter. She lives out her days on her family’s abandoned estate, and where outside, the world’s has undergone some paradigmatic shift. Published in 1999, The Walking Tour reads goofily prescient about many of our early millennium’s technological and ecological fall-outs, taking cyber-enterpenuers to task for their utopic recklessness, their cocksureness in industry and finance that threatens the planet’s climate. And as goes the planet’s climate—unstable, alarming—so goes its politics.
I summarize these jewel-like novels to underscore Davis’s attention to the natural world. She fears extinctions, and mourns them, too. Her novels are rife with cataclysm. The seas change; bees die off; teenage girls are lured into sky-borne dinghies and minced. Tremendous sums of people suffer in Davis’s worlds. This is the novelty of life on earth, but the scale of suffering, now more than ever, is the specific cost of human thoughtlessness.
(And here I’ll note that I left my library in Indiana, all my beloved damn books are 1,700 miles away, why I’m relying on summary, why I’m aching through summary, because remembering the plots of Davis’s novels is antithetical to their experience, their duration; they turn on torrents; they hold strange emotional weather; they cast spells, too, with pages of incantations.)

The distance the novel’s narrator has from its events is something that continues to press against me, to press me inward. A chorus of young ladies, vacationers, sit enchanted by the stories of an older girl named Janice, and these sections alternate and bleed into the morose tales of a doomed love triangle. In her quest for attention, Janice may be manufacturing all of the novel’s events, to keep her clique united by indiscretion. They have innocent pastimes, trading and primping and swimming. After the girls have burned through their card-collecting mania, it seems inevitable that they fall in love with horses, and tell horse stories. To recapture her clique’s attention, Janice embellishes on her equestrian abilities, but the girls know her number:

Almost everyone knew that at Miss Haines’s riding stable Janice had been put on the oldest and slowest horse, a tall white gelding with a tail so thin you could see the bone through the hair. As Janice posted around and around the ring, holding the reins stiffly to either side like a dowser, Miss Haines stood at the rail, shouting directions. Janice was a terrible rider; she was afraid of horses, of all animals really.

Janice’s medium is people, why she fears things that breathe. To control them. She debilitates and incites narrative, and while she can’t ride a horse she’s just fine with a lasso, cajoling and entrapping her young charges with a few simple twists. She need only allude to something forbidden.

I remember girls like Janice from riding on the school bus when I was young, say, nine years old. One such young lady gave me a very anatomical description of sex. She described with her hands how a man’s penis in a woman’s vagina created foam, and she used spit to illustrate. “Foam,” she said, “is what they want.” I was in the third grade and as mortified as I was curious. She was not an unpretty girl, neither stupid nor malicious, and still she suffered. Her dad was a deadbeat and her mother a jailbird. This girl lived with her grandparents, and her grandmother treated her like a toy-daughter, an experiment. The old lady dyed her granddaughter’s hair so often, and in such contrasting hues, that sometimes she got on the bus with hair the dull green color of oxidized pennies, or gnarly red hair, like the dry fiery yarn of a Raggedy Ann doll. When she told you horrible things—about heroin and fucking and the hoax of god—she was holding you rapt by telling you things you weren’t supposed to know. I liked this way better than the way some boys held your attention, which was by fart jokes or smoking straw or beating the shit out of you. Another girl told me about her ability to see auras. She lived by the creed “Death before dishonor,” and conducted a great deal of “unicorn taming” on the playground using a jumprope for reigns. It took maybe ten minutes of nickering and neighing to lather herself up into an ecstatic froth, and then she could see “true colors”—mauve tines and lime syne-waves, radiating from our heathen pores like the bloodgouts of the wounded on battlefields. Maybe she could see this; maybe it was the effect of exhaustion. Maybe she was like Julian of Norwich in that way, and a concussion had opened her third eye. She told me my aura was a bright blue: one stroke of box-color cerulean on glossy white paper. This still checks out. If the surreal exploits in Duplex tend towards allegory—and I think, given the ’50s vibe of the novel, it would not be off-limits to think about the fear of robot neighbors as a gloss on miscegenation, or Eddie’s abduction a variation on child molestation—Davis maintains a verisimilitude regards childhood’s terrors and embarrassments, especially what godforsaken headcases we all were.

And this is the condition of Davis’s storytelling, I think: to sooth and alarm readers about the vicissitudes of providence, about the caprice of human whims, about how the stories of the miraculous—the Resurrection, the lady who lived in a shoe, kids who will believe anything—are at heart melancholic, and make of our lives noble, having borne such disappointment. I want to make it very clear that Davis is not didactic; she is not soapboxing in her novels, she doesn’t church-up sinning or slaver over salvation, she does not fetishize the child. If she did so, her novels would certainly not be as funny as they are, or as insidious. Late in Duplex, after she has accepted the child Walter found for her (he fashioned a muddy yellow bear into a bright baby girl), Mary reflects on her grown daughter’s romantic status:
Now Blue-Eyes lived with her partner, a word that reminded Mary of square-dancing. The partner’s name was Penny and it was obvious that she and Blue-Eyes felt sorry for Mary and Walter, imprisoned as they were in their modern marriage. The two women possessed a lot of information to corroborate their pity—everyone was so confident now, Mary thought. She supposed that was a good thing, especially if you were a girl.
Blithe despair, the effort of staying married to a sorcerer who stole your sweetheart’s soul: square-dancing, patriarchy’s prison, righteousness. The lightness of its characterizations: Mary’s sadness, that her daughter is an uppity stranger to her. The timeliness! I have also wondered why “partner” is simply the most ludicrous word for what may become of my beloved. So it’s precision and decadence and mirth, and puzzlement, and bereavement that is not defeat, that makes of Duplex such a harrowing novel, where seven years have passed since the comforts of The Thin Place. The landscape has changed—literary, cultural, political. Davis seems to have been racing this entire time, rushing outwards on a wave to embrace it.

 

Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place. Back Bay Books; Reprint edition, 2007.

In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there - revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes' tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.

Davis's unconventional style of writing this novel is not well-suited to the audio format. Chapters are told from many different characters' perspectives, and the narrative jumps around from past to present. Since Frasier does not vary her delivery or do much to differentiate the voices of the characters, it's easy to lose the thread of what's going on. The novel frequently tosses in "list-style" items, such as police logs and daily horoscopes, which are slow, distracting and repetitive when read aloud. Frasier's cool, objective voice matches the author's narrative tone, but it makes such potentially exciting scenes as a gunman taking hostages in a church flat and dull. The strength of the audio medium is in its intimacy and emotion, the ability of a talented reader to bring characters and stories to life. A novel such as this, told in the detached tone of an impartial observer, does not play to the medium's strengths. It works better on the page. - Publishers Weekly

In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town's every waking moment. The experiences of Mees's dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister's wife reading her morning paper and "confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight." In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it's just another moment in a particular place. - The New Yorker

THE good news is this isn't another memoir about dieting. The "thin place" isn't Kathryn Davis's gym but a term devised by Celtic Christians to describe a location or state of mind in which the physical and spiritual worlds meet. I should declare immediately that I resent and fear Christianity, not only for its sexism and incitement of violence but for its deadening effect on the imagination. That said, Davis's imagination, religiously inspired or not, seems to be in fine working order, if at times a little aimless. She writes well, sucking on words like they're candy — "Pink buds of bog rosemary, gaping mouths of sundew"; "Midges, mayflies, blackflies, bees" — though you may tire now and then of her choice of candy and all the sucking sounds.
"The Thin Place," Davis's sixth novel, is that rare, brave and original thing: an honest and energetic glimpse into an author's head. It's like being holed up with some crazy old nun. She's never dull but won't stop talking, filling every sentence to the brim with observations and reflections. Sometimes they get out of hand: "Suppose there are many universes, each one called into being at the slightest touch, an action no stronger than a flower? Suppose our galaxy and all the others, instead of drifting more and more slowly, reluctantly even, away from one another . . . are instead speeding up?" Has she just smoked her first joint?
To its credit, this is not a novel that depends on plot."The Thin Place" concerns a small present-day New England community in late spring and early summer. What little drama there is seems contrived; most of the time nothing happens except insights and insect bites. The rewards are all in the writing: one ancient lady "began to head upstairs in that very slow way of the very old, almost as if she were dragging the banister and the attached steps down to her own level rather than rising to meet them."
Generously, Davis never underestimates her readers and assumes that we value the natural world and mourn our eventual removal from it, "the one thing you can reasonably predict." Although she revels in wilderness, glaciers, prehistory, she admits that "to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people — even to go so far as to imagine after people — is obscene." Yet she does imagine it and, perhaps because of her skepticism about humanity as a whole, the novel also features animals as characters. (Luckily, they don't talk.) Her empathy with them is convincing andvivacious: "When you are ruled by curiosity . . . you are rarely affronted" sounds very doglike.
The bad news is that most of these animals are doomed (Jack London and Walt Disney seem to have fixed animals' fictional fate forever). So don't get too attached to those beavers! Davis is skittish as a colt herself, and you don't always know where she's heading: "It was hard being married to a man who treated the least impropriety like the end of the world, like freezing rain and a tractor trailer jackknifing right in front of him and everything going so fast it might as well not be moving, the immense tire and the windshield racing toward each other yet frozen in time." Uh, what? She bewilderingly tells us that the "threadlike twigs" of locust trees are "identical in design to the air tubes in the gill of a mayfly." Her inclusiveness sometimes verges on gush: curtains blowing in a summer breeze are "heart-wrenching" she claims. (Me, I only cry about bedspreads.) But "pendent from the tip of every single thing in the world, a diamond" — about the aftereffects of a storm — is heart-wrenchingly cutesy.
Davis's suppositions about animals are reminiscent of Les Murray's poetry: how a dog thinks as it wanders its neighborhood ("Many deer beds and some human pee in a bush and also birds in trees and lots of squirrels too high to eat and then a house") or a one-track-minded pike ("Kill, Kill, Kill"). Or the mental efforts of a moose, whose vocabulary "consisted of a single (for want of a better word) word, that underwent constant modification, alternately stretching and shrinking." Even lichen "speaks a language like some music, repetitive and incantatory: manna star fold star. star star fold reindeer. fold fold fold fold. starlight starlight."
Human beings pale by comparison, despite Davis's insertion of some annoying magic realism of the "Lovely Bones" variety, the bright insouciance of which undercuts anything serious she might want to say. One little girl resuscitates people by crawling inside their heart valves (or is it their gullets? I couldn't tell) and hooking their eel-like souls back onto their bodies. Yuck-O! Davis is much better on the real minds of 12-year-old girls: "Human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual adventures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn and puppies chewing on slippers and soft pink babies and disembowelings" — as savage and true as something out of Elfriede Jelinek.
Davis has landed herself with far too many townsfolk to describe, and resorts to the currently popular but brutal technique of allowing only one or two characteristics per person. Helen likes "The Forsyte Saga" and hates the woman who runs her nursing home. Richard, the rector, still finds his wife sexually appealing and, when he's not mulling over the meaning of Pentecost (zzzzz), they play tennis. Piet jogs. Billie swims. Daniel smokes. Andrea is a bookbinder. Lorna is not pretty. George has bear trouble. The plot ultimately relies on two strangers, one with a ponytail, the other bald, who stab people and take money from the church. This being on some level a morality tale, the bad men get their comeuppance, along with a few adulterers who have car accidents.
Compared to what Davis has to say about nature and the cosmos, this is disappointing stuff. What the novel needs is a cataclysmic climax, a big bang, not this feeble, frightened little acorn of an ending. After such a buildup, such omniscience on the part of the author, you don't expect Davis's courage to desert her, but it does. Nonetheless, she has done something great here, something heathen, anarchic, democratic. She has given everyone and every thing a voice: animals, plants, children, coma patients, even the earth itself - Lucy Ellmann

 

Kathryn Davis, Hell. Back Bay Books, 2003.

Part mystery, part domestic meditation and part horror story, ""Hell" is Davis's tour de force." (Joy Press, "The Village Voice.") In her brilliantly eerie third novel, three households coexist in a single restless vision.

 This demanding and rewarding third novel by the author of Labrador (Farrar, 1990) and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (LJ 6/1/93) will delight all serious readers. Its sensuous prose and vivid rendering of the minutiae of everyday life propel the reader through three haunting tales woven together. They are the stories of two parents and two daughters in 1950s Philadelphia, a dollhouse whose inhabitants are not quite lifeless, and Edwina Moss, a 19th-century chatelaine of domesticity. The Philadelphia family's story is narrated by the elder daughter, who, infatuated with literature, peppers her narrative with sly allusions to Wuthering Heights (shutters banging, wind sweeping across the moors) and A Girl of the Limberlost. Strained marriages, details of housekeeping, anorexic daughters (both human and not), and the mysterious conflation of two paintings of Heaven and of Hell combine to demand rereading. For all collections of literary fiction.? - Judith Kicinski
   Davis's third (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993) is a tour de force made up of the surreal and the poetic, of skillful shifts in voices, settings, and eras--but, under the pyrotechnics, with a nagging sense of there being primarily the familiar and well trodden. An unnamed 1950s family lives in a place first called ``the town of X'' but seeming later on to be suburban Philadelphia. In one of the rooms of this outwardly proper and well-manicured house- -it's got in it mother, father, two sisters, pet dachshund, and mice--is a dollhouse handed down from another generation: and as Davis's narrative unfolds, readers are treated to the mystery, humor, and irony of its being the dollhouse family rather than the ``real'' family who do the walking, talking, thinking, feeling, and reacting. Along with the versus dolls parallel is another, this one created by now and then: Nearby, in the 1860s, lived one Edwina Moss (the 1950s father's name is Edwin), who, like the later family, had not only a dog but also a daughter who fell ill, rejected food--and may have been mystic. What happens? Well, in both past and present, there's a huge storm, a sick daughter, and, in one way or another, a missing father (the Civil War being the cause in one case, work, temperament, and a stroke in the other). In the later tale, the anorexic daughter--Dorothy--loses her odd friend Joy to death in the hurricane, and learns about anti- Semitism when eccentric neighbor Benny Gold is (or is he?) accused of her murder. It's not always easy to tell what happened or just might have happened, though often enough there's involvement and charm amid the gloom--as when one of the house mice declares of the 1950s family that ``The mother was a drinker, the father a gust of wind.'' Brilliant, accomplished, capable, at times even moving--but with the air of an exercise about it for all that. *justify no* Davis's third (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993) is a tour de force made up of the surreal and the poetic, of skillful shifts in voices, settings, and eras--but, under the pyrotechnics, with a nagging sense of there being primarily the familiar and well trodden. An unnamed 1950s family lives in a place first called ``the town of X'' but seeming later on to be suburban Philadelphia. In one of the rooms of this outwardly proper and well-manicured house- -it's got in it mother, father, two sisters, pet dachshund, and mice--is a dollhouse handed down from another generation: and as Davis's narrative unfolds, readers are treated to the mystery, humor, and irony of its being the dollhouse family rather than the ``real'' family who do the walking, talking, thinking, feeling, and reacting. Along with the versus dolls parallel is another, this one created by now and then: Nearby, in the 1860s, lived one Edwina Moss (the 1950s father's name is Edwin), who, like the later family, had not only a dog but also a daughter who fell ill, rejected food--and may have been mystic. What happens? Well, in both past and present, there's a huge storm, a sick daughter, and, in one way or another, a missing father (the Civil War being the cause in one case, work, temperament, and a stroke in the other). In the later tale, the anorexic daughter--Dorothy--loses her odd friend Joy to death in the hurricane, and learns about anti- Semitism when eccentric neighbor Benny Gold is (or is he?) accused of her murder. It's not always easy to tell what happened or just might have happened, though often enough there's involvement and charm amid the gloom--as when one of the house mice declares of the 1950s family that ``The mother was a drinker, the father a gust of wind.'' Brilliant, accomplished, capable, at times even moving--but with the air of an exercise about it - Kirkus Reviews


The strongest oath I ever heard my father utter was ''hell's bells.'' For years, I wondered who rang them, who heard them, and why the Bible kept quiet about them. Too bad I couldn't have picked up Kathryn Davis's experimental novel, ''Hell.'' It rings with a spiritual anguish that's closer to home than fire and brimstone: the anxiety of people burdened with the knowledge of their own mortality. The narrator's comments on two nearly identical paintings of heaven and hell could stand as an introduction to the whole book:
''Looking at 'Hell' you look at your undeniable complexity and you think, so exquisitely have I been fashioned, there's no reason I shouldn't live forever. Whereas looking at 'Heaven' all you see is limitation. Even the fish are prettier than you.'' The novel is labyrinthine and demanding, mingling crosscut visions of two households and three different centuries. The family of Edwin and Dorothy D. (who live in Philadelphia in the 1950's) takes center stage, and the couple's daughter narrates much of the book. But there are also glimpses of the lives of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on household management, and Antonin Careme, Napoleon's chef. On one level, ''Hell'' can be read as the historically footnoted story of a family torn by tensions -- tensions that hold it together even while pulling it apart. But to call this a historical novel is like sitting down to a dish of paella and calling it rice with clams. On another level, the book is a melange of meditations, voices, scenes, sermons and proverbs linked by two motifs: the houses that shelter us and the food that both sustains us and moves us on toward our inevitable decay. ''Clearly every bite you take hastens the breakdown of flesh,'' the narrator observes, ''and if it was the Devil who invented seasoning, wasn't he trying as usual to cover something up?'' Because a person's relationship to food is the central image Davis uses for the parting of body and soul, nearly all of her characters come down on the side of either feasting or fasting. Not surprisingly, the most impassioned feaster is Edwina Moss, who as a child chooses ''an egg, a potato, a capon, a nut, to replace the dulling rainfalls of human intercourse with the fiery windstorms of the kitchen.'' Her anorexic daughter (who is not the only young woman in the book with an aversion to food) inspires the attending physician to write a treatise on the mystic powers of ''the Fasting Girl of Moss Cottage.'' Even animals know the rules. ''You can either be a ghost or you can be food,'' says a mouse to the ghost of a dead child. ''You can't be both.'' Another familiar metaphor for the uneasy alliance between body and soul is the house. And in a short chapter on houses, Davis's narrator reminds us that the wise man builds his abode on a rock. But spiritual truths uttered in hell lose their luster. Here the wise man is the cautious man, who builds to protect himself from the unknown and the unforeseen: ''However careful we are in the situation of our homes, may we not be made ill in other ways?'' In ''Hell,'' cleanliness is next to godlessness. The rage for perfect order is the desire to create a godless world that can be perfectly controlled by human effort. Indeed, the first page of the novel plunges us into the anxiety of the zealous housekeeper, who has beaten the rugs, mopped the floors and washed the windows, only to find that the panes ''don't reflect back the bright prospect of a clear conscience, but the treacherous face of the world.'' Thus, when a hurricane sends Edwin, Dorothy and their daughters into their cellar for safety, their reunion takes place in a jumbled Hades of emergency items and seldom-used appliances. One of Davis's most effective devices for showing the consequences of order gone awry is the doll house that is handed down to the narrator from her mother and her grandmother: ''Open, the doll house remains a toy; it's impossible to ignore the improbable presence in it of big fingers, their crass ability to put the toilet in the living room, the butler on the roof. Better by far to keep it closed.'' Behind the closed facade, one can imagine that the dolls are capable of thought, and we are confronted with ''a tiny mother (not the frowsy-haired doll but a real woman with blood running through her thread-thin veins and nimble fingers the size of eyelashes).'' As Davis moves back and forth from the doll house to the big house, the two spheres merge, revealing the isolation her characters wish to escape. Edwin's stroke, which is described early in the book, becomes grotesquely comic when reduced to the accidental tumble of a toy: ''The mother, meanwhile, hectically pushing her carpet sweeper back and forth over the same square inch of blue carpet sample, has come upon the father, spread-eagled on the floor next to the plaster milk bottle. This is what happens, she says, when you don't love me enough. She gives him a little poke with the sweeper, then sighs and continues cleaning the carpet, its shade of blue identical to his eyes. . . . Lucky for me I don't have a heart, she says, bending the wire stem of her neck, bringing her head closer to the father's. Only wires and fluff, she adds.'' Davis's writing shines brightest when, with sinuous sentences and catalogues of objects, she describes interiors so complex that you feel as if you'd stepped into a box assembled by Joseph Cornell. A list of the contents of a kitchen drawer evokes the 1950's, and, considering his penchant for dolls behaving like humans, it's no surprise that E. T. A. Hoffmann shows up on the house's bookshelves. Lest we miss the point, one short section of the novel is devoted to a discussion of dolls, Freud and Hoffmann's tale ''The Sandman.'' Fans of Davis's two previous novels will recognize her style in this one. There's the same elegant display of learning that shapes the voice of the narrator in ''The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.'' And the relationship between two adolescent girls that occupies the second half of ''Hell'' recalls the two sisters in ''Labrador.'' For all its intelligence and verbal brio, Davis's new novel will not please everyone, especially not those readers who like their fiction readily accessible. But the next time I catch ''The Wizard of Oz'' on television and hear Dorothy say, ''There's no place like home'' as she clicks her ruby heels together, I'll whisper, ''You don't know the half of it. - Nancy Willard

 

Kathryn Davis, Versailles. Back Bay Books; Reprint ed., 2003.

read it at Google Books

Wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise, this novel of the life of Marie Antoinette finds the characters struggling to mind their step in the great ballroom of the world.

Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. Knopf, 1993.

A young woman in flight from her past, and an old woman whose secrets are contained in the grave--with this configuration, Davis begins a novel of true bravura about opera, adultery, and murder.

Kathryn Davis,  The Walking Tour, Mariner Books, 2000.

read it at Google Books

Two couples -- businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife, Carole Ridingham; his partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr -- have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter, Susan, who lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, and a young vagrant who has taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.  

Kathryn Davis, Labrador, Mariner Books, 2000.
read it at Google Books


A New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, Kathryn Davis's "dazzling first novel" (Kirkus Reviews) "transforms a literary commonplace -- a young girl's transition from childhood to adulthood -- into a brilliantly original story" (Belles Lettres). In LABRADOR, Davis conjures two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the elder, is beautiful and wayward. Kitty, the younger, is a loner whose only means of escaping the bewitching influence of her sister is to follow her grandfather to his home in Labrador, where she cannot avoid confronting the demons that haunt her.
A tale of two sisters and the ambiguous, sometimes destructive ties that bind them, LABRADOR is a tender meditation on love, its joys, its limitations, and its hidden bitterness.

Kathryn Davis is a relatively obscure author, although she doesn't deserve to be. Part of it may be her relatively intimidating choice of topics: the history of opera, the French Revolution, Napoleon's chef, Welsh myth. It is also perhaps partially due to half of her books not being available in paperback. For years, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Hell stalled at hardback stage, intimidating new readers with the price. But now Little, Brown brings these two novels and her latest, Versailles, into paperback for the first time. Kathryn Davis spoke to Bookslut on the phone from Skidmore.
I got a bundle of your books from Little, Brown the first time that The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Hell had been in paperback. What happened that those two books had never been in paperback before?
Great question. To tell you the truth, I can't answer. When the publishing history of Girl Who Trod on a Loaf had ended at Knopf, there was no paperback, even though the book had done very well. I had never understood why there wasn't a paperback of that book. And then Hell was published by Ecco. It also did well, so I can't answer you. It's a mystery. It was an annoying mystery at the time.
What year did Hell originally come out?
It came out in '98, I think. But I had finished it, and it took awhile first to find the publisher, because the editor who had published the previous novel (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf), when he read Hell, it just knocked him for a loop. In a bad way. He sort of didn't want to have anything to do with it. Then my agent kind of threw up her hands, because I think she had been hoping he would take it. She didn't really shop it around as much as in retrospect I think she might have because she just thought if Gary wasn't going to publish it, probably nobody would. She actually said that to me. Then she sent it to one of the other smaller presses, and finally Ecco bought it. That was good, but it took a while. It had been finished several years before it finally saw print.
What was the response like for that, being a more difficult book than the one before it?
I'm trying to remember. By and large I got pretty good reviews. I got some really, really good reviews for Hell, but there was a kind of fury on the part of some reviewers, as if I was purposely trying to give them a hard time, which had not been the case. There was a reviewer at the Washington Post Book World, whose name I can't remember right now, but he's one of their main reviewers, and he just really, really took offense. Ever since then, whenever he has a chance to review one of my books, he's like someone who's just jumping up and down on top of a box until it's flat. And some people reviewed it just perplexed, but in a sort of respectful way. And then some people got it and loved it, and those were great reviews.
With this new book, Versailles, what made you write about Marie Antoinette, a rather reviled figure in history?
I came about it sort of through the back door. And I had certainly never thought about writing an historical novel. But I was in Paris with my husband and daughter, and my daughter really wanted to go to Versailles. I'd been there years and years ago, when I was about her age actually. I had hated it because I thought it was fussy and pretentious and claustrophobic. I tried to convince her that we should go somewhere else. She persisted, and we went to Versailles. We were walking through the gardens, we were doing that before going inside the building, and I thought I had never been to a place that amazed me so much. And I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn't know in what way. I just wanted to use it somehow.
A couple of days went by, and we were still in Paris. My daughter wanted to go to the Conciergerie, which is the prison where the people who were about to be taken out to have their heads chopped off lived in these little cells. They sort of refurbished Marie Antoinette's cell in the Conciergerie, they made a replica of the room she would have been in. And again, I didn't particularly want to go. I actually don't have that big an interest in history. I never especially liked history class in high school. I don't like museums very much. I dragged my heels, but we went. And then it was while we were there, and I was looking at this teeny-weeny little cell, and thinking that the woman who had lived at Versailles had come at the end of her life to live in a room barely the size of my bathroom. There was something about that, and what it suggested about the shape of a life that got me excited. Then I thought, well, I'll write about Marie Antoinette.
I read one review of the book that seemed angry that you at all tried to make her sympathetic. Why do you think she still inspires such ire?
I think that if people don't know anything at all about her, what they do tend to know is she was a frivolous woman who had no concern whatsoever for the starving people of France. People also hear the "let them eat cake" statement, which she never made. There's that sort of sense of her being the epitome of heartlessness, and I think what it does is she ends up being a person upon whom those of us who are disaffected with the way our political leaders treat us, people who feel furious, project some of that fury onto figures from the past, like Marie Antoinette, who are perceived to be as heartless and thoughtless as, for instance, the Bush administration. Eating their state dinners while a lot of people don't have any food.
You don't like history so much, but this book has such a level of detail, even what type of person went into which entrance of Versailles. Did you enjoy doing that kind of research?
I loved it. I really loved it. I suppose that if there's a real purpose to my delving into a historic period, I had made such a personal connection with Marie Antoinette and the building and that particular time in history that I could hardly get enough of it once I had started. It also makes me understand why historians are avid to dig into periods of history. I had never really gotten that drift of that before. How much time do you spend on your research? Even The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf was very in-depth in its knowledge of opera and the time period.
One of the rules that I make for myself is that I don't precede the writing by doing the research. That's probably very different from the way a historian would proceed. I jump in with both feet without having a very clear idea of what was happening historically, or without having a really clear idea of the history of opera, for instance. And then as I find that I need information, I just pull around. What I didn't want was for the book to sound like a graduate thesis. I don't want it to feel so researched that you don't feel like you're reading about actual people and places and things. So in the case of Versailles, because I really didn't know anything at all about Marie Antoinette except for the way her life ended and a couple little things I remembered from 11th grade history class, I read two biographies straight through, and then the rule I had for myself was that I couldn't take notes while I was reading and I could only really use what I remembered. And then I had a huge pile of other books that I would dip in and out of, books about cooking or folklore or geography as the need arose. I couldn't really measure the amount of time I spent on research. It was probably a considerable amount of time, but it always felt like a part of writing instead of a separate endeavor.
You seem to use a lot of fairy tales and fables throughout your books. Are they starting points, or do they show themselves as parallels while you're writing? It seems to be a recurring theme for you.
I think it's just that it's something I am really attracted to and always have been, so that just as… oh, I don't know. I've just been rereading Ross Macdonald's murder mysteries, the Lew Archer books, and there's always a lot of information about automobiles. And I figure he must be really into automobiles. I think there's some way in which the stuff that you are attracted to or passionate about or troubled by is going to pop up in a work of fiction. I think I always have a lot of food in my work. I like to have people eating things. And I've noticed that I often have birthday parties, I don't know what that's all about. But I realize there are certain things that keep coming back no matter how diligently I attempt to make sure that every book I write is not like every other book I've written. I don't want to repeat myself, and then I realized after I had finished The Walking Tour, every single book I'd written had ended or had had a moment in it where somebody got shot or died while they were standing up to their waist in water. That just seems so ridiculous. Why? I don't know. But that didn't happen in Versailles.
Another theme to your work seems to be women's domestic lives. At one point in Hell you mention that the lives of two adolescent girls are not what great books are written about, and yet it keeps showing up in your books. Why do you think it's so neglected in literature, and why are you so drawn to it?
I think it has been neglected in what is considered "serious" literature. I think this is in some way changing, but certainly when I was first encountering literature, the "serious" work all had to do with issues having to do with men making their way in the world or fighting wars or brother against brother, father and son, and really not a whole lot about girls. And that was primarily because the books were being written by men. So you had a couple of women who were grudgingly permitted to enter the canon, but for the most part even what they dealt with was, the scope of it was always a little suspect, as if the lives of two girls growing up would not be as interesting as the lives of two boys growing up. Like Huck Finn. I just was never as interested in reading about boys growing up as I was in reading about girls growing up because I was interested in seeing how my own experience was somehow reflected or illuminated by the books that I read.
And I still don't really like books that don't have any women in them at all. I'll read them. They don't have to be all women, but it's nice if there's at least one. I'm sure that's why I had trouble with Moby Dick. Sena J. Nasland's book, the one about Ahab's wife, which I haven't read, certainly seemed like a response to that feeling. And it's always treated as if it's serious or important. I think that's what really infuriates me, that certain level of bigness that a lot of 30- to 40-year-olds are writing great, big, fat books that are supposed to have a great, big, fat scope to them, as if the thickness of the book somehow has to do with the seriousness of the book, and it has to talk about things in a comprehensive way politically and historically in order to be considered serious literature. I really wanted my book Versailles to be not a big fat book, but I still wanted it to be dealing with things that I think of as important things. Not just frivolity.
You teach English courses at Skidmore. Do you feel like, being part of the academic world, you're more surrounded by the implied importance of the big, fat, male novels?
I think it's sort of everywhere. The English department of Skidmore is pretty hospitable to the idea that those big, fat, male books are not the only important books in the canon. There's room made for a wider range. But that's an interesting question. I suppose it's possible that the academic world, the way I really got going on the subject, the way I am often infuriated, may be exacerbated by the fact that I'm in an academic environment where I see certain things honored and other things ignored.
How did your introduction to the NYRB reprint of The Vet's Daughter come about? Did they approach you?
Yeah, I had never even read that book. Edwin Frank, who runs that series, had actually called me a year earlier, wondered if I wanted to do an introduction to an Ivy Compton Burnet book they were going to bring back into print. I also hadn't read that one, and when I read it I didn't think I liked it enough to write a really good introduction. I thought my reservations would show. I told him I didn't want him to forget me in the future, and so he didn't. I think he has in mind a number of writers. He's reviewed my books, so he knows my work and presumably likes it, but also would imagine I would like a certain number of the writers he wants to bring back into print. I think that's how he gets all of his introducers. They're always an interesting combination. - Jessa Crispin


An Interview by Donna Seaman
Interview by Laurence Ross
Interview at Hazel & Wren
Self-interview
interview by theharvardadvocate