Theodore Sovinski

I am currently about halfway through Evan Dara’s 2013 novel Flee. In a fashion typical of Dara’s work, the book is told mostly in a polyvocal style: unattributed voices interrupt each other, pick up in the middle of stories and anecdotes and give way to the next voice before the reader is shown more than a glimpse. The following comes from the chapter entitled  “9,441;” the chapters so far are all titled like this, reflecting the dwindling population of Anderburg, the town at the center of Flee (although flipping ahead I see a chapter titled “X”).

“—My skis. My nice four-speed blender. My bookshelves, my printer, all my silverware, my wine rack. They are yours, you can have them. I will have no yard sale, and I have no one to give them to. As long as you do something with them, as long as you have some use for them they are yours, whoever you are—

—Finally, out of—

—Yes, finally: free!

—Shame on, to—

—I try, you know, I try to – to commit and resist and maintain brave face. To drive my pilings right straight into the ground. Then, on Sunday, I’m sitting in my living room, in my own home, pulling myself through the July receipts, and I look out my window and see a man, somewhat in stealth, certainly in silence, I see this man in a magenta track suit and tennis shoes sprint across my neighbor’s lawn and pull Genise and Alexei Ratmansky from their house. One by one, first Genise, then Alexei – both of them are in their eighties – this man guides them by the shoulder and the elbow and toddles them across the lawn, then presses them into his car. The car’s two rear doors were waiting open at curbside. Was it – do they have a son? And the car’s motor was left running, and snap the man closes the doors, jumps in behind the wheel and they gun off. And standing in the middle of the lawn, in the middle of this Entebbe, the sprinkler, circling, stuttering, spraying—”

The excerpt gives a good look at Dara’s narrative technique, the layering of voices on top of each other without a clear idea of the speakers’ identities or towards whom they are directing these outbursts. This section also draws out some of the recurring themes of the book so far, that is, the sense that Anderburg is undergoing the kind of post-industrial decline, triggered by the collapse of its local university, its big local employer (a parallel to the Ozark corporation in Dara’s first book, The Lost Scrapbook), that many cities in the United States have undergone following the financial collapse. However, the second longer paragraph, about the elderly couple, shows another theme of the book, which is the paranoia gripping the town as its residents (I know, I know) “flee.” There are episodes like this throughout the book: troops marching through the streets (national guardsmen? riot police?), hit-and-runs as people haul ass out of Anderburg without a backwards glance, squatters’ dens being bust up, etc. Flee often balances between indulging these conspiracies and pondering over the mundanity of the town’s collapse and the way in which nothing, really, can be done. More to follow on Flee soon.