Review by New York Times Review
"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 "Bodywithout-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, "dáctilo ports" in restrooms, those flying scows), and then there are things that fall somewhere in between: the word "aquanaut," a purseshaped 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 is a writer, cartoonist and assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Characters do occupy duplexes in the latest mind-bending novel from the ever-provocative Davis (The Thin Place, 2006). But because this is a wildly imaginative tale of dualities, the seemingly simple concept of duplex is, like blown glass, superheated and stretched into astonishing shapes and dimensions. Humans and robots live together on an orderly suburban street. The robots look human by day but turn back into little needle-like entities at night. Large gray rabbits are everywhere. Miss Vicks, a teacher, regularly walks her dachshund and sometimes finds herself traversing a bizarrely morphing landscape. Everyone adores the neighborhood sweethearts, pretty Mary and baseball star Eddie; then strange and sinister things happen to them in encounters with a man known as Sorcerer. An older girl bewitches the younger girls with alarming stories involving a prophecy about a half-human, half-robot child and a catastrophic flood. 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. The result 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept. 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This sixth novel from Davis (The Thin Place) opens in a typical suburban setting, with tree-lined streets and duplexes housing traditional two-parent families as well as the single, middle-aged schoolteacher Miss Vicks. But there are soon clues that we are encountering something quite different. It is mentioned that one of the duplexes houses a family of robots and that Miss Vicks is dating a sorcerer known as Body-Without-Soul. What follows is a strange and mesmerizing tale that is simultaneously an exploration of 20th-century American social mores and dark surrealist fantasy. The central characters include Miss Vicks and her students Mary and Eddie. Explored in unexpected ways are our anxieties about love, sex, parenthood, and aging. While it's unclear whether the surreal elements of the novel are meant to be allegorical or taken literally, in the end it doesn't matter. -VERDICT Fans of Neil Gaiman and dark adult fantasy and adventurous readers of literary fiction will find Davis's offering a compelling read.-Christine -DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., -Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
