Here is a short story written in 2019 by myself. I have a very bad understanding of the online literary scene and I have been frankly lazy in figuring it out so I didn’t know where might be a good home for it. Just to get it out in the world I’m going to post it here.
Tag: Literature
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Review of Evan Dara’s novel “Flee”
What to say about Evan Dara that hasn’t been said already? Dara belongs to a group of writers that, having read them, make me feel as if I’ve gained entrance to a kind of privileged club, like I’ve become in-the-know. Dara is often described as a well-kept secret in American literature, although this is clearly by choice: Dara is, famously, hermetic. There is speculation that the name “Evan Dara” is in fact a pseudonym, with some hazarding the suspicion that he is actually the writer Richard Powers, though as one reader put it, “If Powers really is Dara, then he has no business writing anything more as Powers.”
I started reading Dara’s most recent novel, Flee, after stumbling, wide-eyed, through his debut The Lost Scrapbook. My experience of reading big novels like that can be like climbing up a tall hill, forging through the thickets and sweating it out for a while, eventually reaching the peak, enjoying the view, and then galloping down the scree and careening towards the valley below at a breakneck pace. Big novels often present a commanding landscape that I have to adapt to, which is to say that I have to learn how to read them. At some point I tip over into having some sort of understanding of, you know, what it is the author is doing and how things are proceeding. Once things truly start to click, usually in the last quarter of the book, I have become so immersed in the logic of the book, in its style and architecture, that I get syncopated into a certain double-time rhythm and read much quicker and at a much more fluid pace than before. Most recently I experienced this reading Samuel Delaney’s opus Dhalgren; I felt this way with The Lost Scrapbook.
But to the point: Flee. The novel is about the collapse of Anderburg, Vermont, triggered by the collapse of its local university and major employer Pitkinson. An inquiring student wants to take a sociology course, wants to major in the subject in fact, only to discover that the department, courses and all, exists only on paper. But the plot itself is ancillary to Flee; the real central organizing feature, the main attraction, is Dara’s narrative technique. The first analogy that comes to mind is the Greek chorus, although where the chorus functions as an expository device, supporting the main narrative, here I would argue that the polyvocal narrative is the central plot of the book. This book is not as radical in its commitment to the multitude-of-voices narrative technique as The Lost Scrapbook, however; there are a few characters who emerge from the current and are given their own sections conducted by a third-person narrator. For most of the novel these sections are given to Rick and Carol, a couple trying to stem the tide of Anderburg’s demise by creating a staffing agency to fill the many local vacancies. This story drifts in and out of focus, set in a different type than the rest of the book, but it feels to me as if this is not the main story propped up by the polyvocal sections. In fact I think the opposite is true, that Dara uses the third-person narrator to focus on Rick and Carol (and later, Marcus) as a way to shore up or concretize the rest of the book.
Reading Flee gave me the sense of being submerged in the voices that, in snippets sometimes as short as a sentence fragment, tell the story of Anderburg’s collapse. The Rick and Carol plot functions as a series of harbors I took refuge in, but again, the main experience was dunking myself into the polyvocal sections and letting them carry me. The penultimate chapter, titled “X,” is the only other section given a third-person narrator. It follows Marcus, who, at the nadir of Anderburg’s population crash, becomes obsessed with the idea of gratitude and commits himself to building a center dedicated to its scientific research. He is met with about the same material success as Rick and Carol: virtually none. However, the final chapter seems to point towards reconstitution, featuring voices who talk about moving to Anderburg, so maybe his efforts don’t go unrewarded after all.
Ultimately “X” functions as a pivot in the novel, right at the end. The community, depopulated, served by apparatchiks who commute from out of town and outnumbered by shims, begins to eke back to life in the last chapter. Marcus, the protagonist of this chapter, is the Anderburgian par excellence, whose concrete attempts at reaching out to his community are thwarted at nearly every step: when he tries to connect with a neighbor after a long game of record-player telephone, the house goes silent as soon as he turns toward the door. He repeatedly tries to hold a conversation with a friend who steadily ignores him while he packs and re-packs his bags. He is surprised to see homes thought abandoned lit up, only to realize the lights are on a security timer. And yet, he delves into his work on gratitude and in so doing dissolves the boundaries of his sense of self.
Thematically there is a streak of anti-corporate politics at the heart of the novel, something that I can clearly trace back to The Lost Scrapbook. That novel’s anxiety about ecological disaster spurred on by corporate malfeasance is here replaced by a paranoia towards the kind of Amazon-style, inscrutable corporations who sidle their way into communities only to act without accountability and towards policies discordant with the local reality. The city government is absent, basically outsourced, effective only at tearing down fliers in record time. Flee is a political novel, or it is one that concerns itself with the political. The book features town halls where almost no one shows up, but it also pursues a democratic vision in its narrative technique. This is certainly not autofiction, in fact it’s antithetical to that subgenre’s ontological stance. The narrator, for much of the book, can best be described as the town itself, its citizens. There’s an essay to be written, by a better critic than me, about the communal in Dara’s work and the way in which his anonymity harmonizes with that vision.
I’m having a great time immersing myself in Dara’s work. As soon as I finished The Lost Scrapbook I ordered Flee and his second novel, The Easy Chain, which arrived a few days ago. It’s up next on the queue, though the prospect of reading it is tinged with regret since it’ll mean I’ve finished everything he’s written. There’s a rumor floating around the internet, perhaps a hoax or an erudite joke, that there’s another Dara novel coming soon. Here’s hoping that’s true.
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Excerpt from Evan Dara’s “Flee”
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.
Theodore Sovinski 