Review by New York Times Review
JOY JONES, THE narrator of "Find Me," Laura van den Berg's pleasingly strange first novel, has spent her whole life waiting to be found. Born in the winter of 1995, she was left on the steps of a Boston hospital. The nurses gave her a name. Her birthday is only a guess. She grew up in a series of foster and group homes, feeling perpetually unwanted. At the age of 19, Joy has learned that suffering doesn't lead to self-improvement; it leads to more suffering. She lives alone in a small basement apartment without windows, subsisting on soup cups and lime Jell-O. She has no friends, and finds that "to look inside yourself and see so much mystery is the worst kind of loneliness." Joy works the graveyard shift as a cashier at Stop & Shop, where she steals a steady supply of cherry-flavored Robitussin, maximum strength. She's aware that she might get fired, but the thing about addiction is that it's hard to stop: "Cough syrup, those hits of dextromethorphan, seemed like a not unreasonable way to manage my life," she says. Anyone who has read van den Berg's distinctive story collections, "What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us" (2009) and "The Isle of Youth" (2013), knows that she favors eccentric characters and surreal gestures. Her stories are filled with acts of violence, abandoned children, dead or missing parents and estranged couples. Her dark sensibility calls to mind the great Joy Williams, a master at portraying life on the margins. Both seem contemptuous of sentimentality and easy redemption. In van den Berg's fiction, much is left unexplained. The bizarre and the mundane often bump up against each other, shrug and join forces. Her stories unfold as enigmatic puzzles, ending in ambiguity and unease. (If you have a low tolerance for paratactic sentences and pure weirdness, this novel probably isn't for you.) "Find Me" features a lethal epidemic that sweeps across the nation. Symptoms include bodily constellations of silver blisters ("like fish scales") and sudden memory loss. Victims, forgetting everything they know, fall into a coma and typically die within a week. As the toll rises, so does a thriving black market for hazmat suits. The government creates a website, WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com, where people check for names of the dead. Joy is among the lucky: Despite exposure to the infected, she remains immune. Not long after coming into possession of an old photograph, supposedly of her mother, Joy is invited to stay at a fortress-like facility called the Hospital, in remote Kansas, where doctors want to study a group of survivors for possible genetic abnormalities. Theories about the virus abound - "biological attack, apocalypse, environmental meltdown" - yet no one knows why hundreds of thousands are dying so quickly. "Our borders with Mexico and Canada were closed," Joy says. "For once, no one wanted to come in. And they definitely didn't want us coming out." Eager to escape the tedium of her life, she signs a contract for a 10-month quarantine at the Hospital and is assured that apart from blood tests and psychological examinations, nothing will be asked of her. "Sounds like the beginning of a horror movie," she says. The Hospital is run by the secretive Dr. Bek, an L. Ron Hubbard type given to gnomic utterances. He is "always reminding us of our specialness," Joy says, and telling the patients that when "our feelings stay in hiding, bad things can happen." Dr. Bek conducts strange experiments and forbids contact with the outside world, assuring patients he has given them a refuge. The Hospital is a former psychiatric institution where no mail goes in or out, no razors are allowed in the showers and there are no working clocks. Patients sent to the mysterious 10th floor are never seen again. Joy's confidant and roommate, Louis, is one of her few consolations. Sometimes they have sex. When the inmates learn from television reports that the epidemic has receded into a recovery, their demands for release are met with obfuscation and propaganda. A revolt is imminent Joy senses that she'll have to force her way out, and stumbles across something that will soon spur her into action. Watching a Discovery Channel show featuring Beatrice Lurry, an "underwater archaeologist" who lives near Key West, Joy is seized by a "primal feeling" that Lurry is the woman in the Polaroid. Reunion scenarios form an obsessive loop in Joy's mind. She has a long list of questions to ask her mother. "Find Me" is split in two, with the first half chronicling Joy's experience at the Hospital and recollections of her traumatic past. This section is suspenseful and taut. In the second half, Joy embarks on her quixotic road trip from Kansas to Florida to meet the woman she believes is her mother. These later chapters are more meandering and episodic. Like an apocalyptic Dorothy Gale, Joy encounters an array of peculiar characters, including a thug, "tall as a giant," called No Name; a former foster brother, Marcus, who wears Halloween masks and accompanies Joy on her journey; and two demented squatters: Nelson, who plays cops and robbers with a red toy gun, and his wife, Darcie, who has caramel-colored teeth, wears white angel wings and communes with the dead. Despite the shortcomings in its latter half, "Find Me" is impressively original and tricky to categorize. Before dismissing it as yet another dystopian novel, know that the lure of a deadly epidemic proves somewhat misleading. The viral outbreak is relegated to the background, its ominous implications never fully explored. Joy regards the harrowing reports of the world outside with self-protective detachment, though the disaster compels her to face her painful history. "I am tangled up in a net of remembering," she says, her mind having "washed away what it could not stand to remember." As it turns out, the Hospital, suffocating and eerie, is the more immediate danger. Even after she summons the courage to escape, Joy realizes "there's a part of me that is still locked up and will never be anything but locked up." Nor is "Find Me" a familiar narrative of a child in search of a long-lost parent. Whether the object of Joy's fixation is her real mother, a ghost, a dream or just "an idea of a person" makes no difference in the end. Joy has already conjured her into being. Although the novel's title is most obviously understood as a daughter's plea to the woman who abandoned her, it can also be read as an imperative note to self: Joy is on a quest to reshape her identity as she pleases. "Imagine a world where you can go to a store and pick out a new person to be," she says. As Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," and, true or false, Joy could not survive without hers. She keeps rewriting the endings. "Deception is necessary," a character in "The Isle of Youth" says. "Otherwise the world will just sandblast us away. You have to keep something for yourself." "Find Me" has a funny way of resonating beyond its pages. Recently, a headline appeared in a London tabloid: "Missing Woman Remains Found." It's a solecism, of course. But in the context of van den Berg's off-kilter novel, the phrase makes perfect sense. A lethal epidemic sweeps across the nation, killing hundreds of thousands. CARMELA CIURARU is the author of "Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Some first novels swoop in out of the blue; others evolve out of a writer's pristinely crafted short stories. Such is the case with O. Henry Award-winner Laura van den Berg, who sparked critical acclaim and reader excitement with her distinctive first book, What the World Will Look like When All the Water Leaves Us (2009), a collection of stories about the mysterious and the monstrous. Her second story collection, The Isle of Youth (2013), appeared on many best of the year lists and won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Find Me, her transfixing first novel, is in keeping with her short stories thematically, and yet, in its deep soundings, it's a commanding departure. Joy, 19, is locked up in the Hospital along with dozens of other inmates. They're in extreme quarantine, tended to by a staff in full hazmat gear. They were brought to this long-abandoned psychiatric hospital in the vast emptiness of Kansas because they survived direct exposure to the sickness, a highly contagious disease that is rampaging across the country, killing people in the tens of thousands. It's believed that the inmates' blood holds the key to a cure and vaccine. But the protocols for this isolated study are awfully peculiar, their total isolation worrisome. This reads like the beginning of a literary postpandemic or postapocalyptic tale along the lines of Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Edan Lepucki's California (2014), and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014), each of which portrays dispossessed young women seeking sanctuary and a way forward in a devastated world. This scenario also brings to mind this season's terrifying and tragic Ebola outbreak. But van den Berg is conducting a more internalized investigation into the complex consequences of abandonment and abuse. She is asking how one faces the tumult and tempests of life without roots or an anchor. Left on the front steps of a hospital as a baby, Joy grows up in group and foster homes, where the inexplicable is the norm. She loses her entire eighth year the slate rubbed blank after the psychologist son of her first foster parents moves back home and does something unspeakable to her. When she is 13, she grows close to a gentle, slightly clairvoyant foster brother, Marcus, who wears Halloween masks to conceal his disfigured face. Eventually, Joy ends up living in a windowless basement apartment, working the graveyard shift at a convenience store and drinking cough syrup for a cheap high. Then the aunt she never knew she had, who is dying of the sickness, gives Joy an old photograph of her mother. No name, no information, only a trace resemblance. Brooding, acutely observant, compassionate, suspicious, wistful, and wryly funny, Joy is an entrancing and sympathetic narrator through which van den Berg can channel her abiding fascination with what is submerged, hidden, lurking, lost. On her twentieth birthday, still in the Hospital, Joy watches a Discovery Channel show, Mysteries of the Sea, featuring a ship detective, or underwater archaeologist based in Key West. Joy is certain that this deep-sea sleuth is the woman in the photograph. Her mother.In the second half of the novel, Joy travels through the decimated countryside, determined to reach Key West. Perilous journeys and quixotic quests are literature's archetypal themes, and American fiction is scored by countless cross-country treks, including a growing number of postapocalypic journeys. On Joy's dark odyssey, she travels through eerie, poisoned landscapes, meets an eccentric couple squatting in a rotting, haunted mansion, and is nearly trampled by a stampede of people in black, their faces painted white. Joy sees that far more is wrong than the sickness. The climate is out of whack, and there are many intimations of further catastrophes. Van den Berg's enveloping novel of a plague and a seeker in an endangered world reveals what it feels like to grow up unwanted and unknown in a civilization hell-bent on self-destruction. It is also a beautifully strange, sad, and provocative inquiry into our failure to love, cherish, and protect. But ultimately, Find Me is a delving story of courage, persistence, and hope.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The debut novel from van den Berg brings the lightly speculative touch to real-world longing that characterizes her collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, but against an apocalyptic backdrop that, at first, feels all too familiar. As a mysterious illness spreads across the world, a 19-year-old orphan girl called Joy Jones is living as ward of the sinister Hospital, along with other immune children, subject to the strange experiments of Dr. Bek, whose interest in Joy extends beyond medical inquiry. Indeed, amid an "epidemic of forgetting," Joy fights for her memories of life, and hopes to be somehow reunited with her mother, whom she believes to be a nautical detective, a finder of lost ships, operating off the coast of Florida. Hoping to escape the fate of the Hospital's other residents and nurtured by rumors of the outside world, Joy journeys from Kansas City to Florida, chasing visions alongside her only companion, a boy in a rubber mask named Marcus. This post-Hospital half of the novel plays to van den Berg's strengths, with wild excursions into dangerous new environments populated by memorable oddballs, never losing sight of the emotional core of Joy's quest. The earlier chapters are hampered by future-isms that are cliché and conclusions that feel tedious or foregone-but in Joy, van den Berg has created a voice that never feels false, only lost and dreaming of being found. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. A deadly virus has swept across America, killing hundreds of thousands. Joy, who was abandoned as an infant and grew up in a series of both foster and group homes, is one of a select few survivors chosen for a specialized course of treatment in a hospital in Kansas. As she follows the mind-numbing routines and regulations of the hospital, Joy begins to suspect that something is being hidden from the patients. By chance she discovers the identity of her birth mother and dreams of finding her, as well as Marcus, a former foster brother. VERDICT Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, van den Berg's debut novel (after two successful story collections) presents a frighteningly plausible near-future dystopia grounded in human elements. Not everything is explained, and things take an increasingly surreal turn in the novel's second half, but Joy's quest, and her need to feel cared for, is heartbreakingly real and compellingly wrought. The book's ambiguous conclusion may lead to rereading as the possibility of multiple interpretations is opened. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2015. 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 School Library Journal Review
The world is starting to fall apart just as Joy begins putting herself back together. Abandoned by her mother at birth and raised in several foster care and group home situations, Joy has struggled to find direction. When a deadly sickness spreads across the country, first stripping people of their memories and then propelling them from dementia to death, Joy finds out she is immune to this disease and is admitted to a hospital that is looking for a cure. She uses this time to reflect on her life thus far and make a plan to track down her birth mother. The first-person narration allows readers to follow the story through Joy's changing perspective, which creates a mood that subtly moves from ambivalence to determination. Teens will be compelled to discover more about the mystery of the illness, and themes of survival and self-discovery will resonate with them. This debut novel's interesting exploration of how people behave during times of crisis mixed with the dynamics of hospital living is a combination of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (Turtle Bay Bks., 1993) and Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco, 2014). VERDICT Give this to introspective teens who enjoy postapocalyptic stories and lyrical language.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ © Copyright 2015. 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
In the last days of modern civilization, a young orphan from Boston makes her way across the dangerous wastelands of America. This is not an adventure for her. Post-apocalyptic novels can bend in a lot of directionsin the past decade we've seen the murky emotional depths of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the political metaphor of World War Z by Max Brooks, and the fragile state of fear of Edan Lepucki's California. This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, 2013, etc.) tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. Our heroine is the ironically named Joy Jones, an emotionally barren young woman with no family or friends who now slogs at a day job under the influence of a soul-deadening amount of cough syrup. She's not the most ebullient spirit even before a modern plague strikes, killing half the world. She's given to saying things like, "I wonder if I will ever know what it's like to feel at peace," and "No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me." As hundreds of thousands of victims succumb, Joy is taken to a hospital complex in Kansas where she's subjected to strange tests both medical and psychological, has emotionless sex with her roommate and recoils at the deaths of twin boys. While at the hospital, Joy learns that her long-lost mother is an underwater archaeologist featured in a series of television documentaries that she watches like they are her only lifeline. The remainder of the book covers Joy's trek to find her mother, traveling in the company of Marcus, a boy who shared one of her many foster homes. Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful, and her portrayals can also be disarmingly sensitive, as if we might break this girl just by reading about her. "I've grown up knowing the world is fragile," she says. "No one needs to tell me that." A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
