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    Dan
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    Dan
    Unavailable
    Dan
    Ebook139 pages2 hours

    Dan

    By Joanna Ruocco

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Joanna Ruocco's Dan is a tiny novel that packs a massive punch.” —Bustle

    Melba Zuzzo, erstwhile innocent of the male-heavy hamlet of Dan, a town located in the foothills of ... somewhere? ... finds herself in a rut. In fact she was probably born into this rut, but today, for some reason, she feels suddenly aware of it. Everything is changing, yet nothing is making sense. The people she might rely upon, the habits she should find comforting—everything is off. It's as if life, which has gone by largely unnoticed up to now, has been silently conspiring against her the whole time. In Dan, Joanna Ruocco has created a slapstick parable that brings together the restless undercurrents and unabashed campiness of Thomas Pynchon with the meandering imaginative audacity of Raymond Roussel. Either Dan is a state of mind, beyond the reach of any physical map, or else it sits on every map unnoticed, tucked beneath the big red dot that tells us YOU ARE HERE.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDorothy, a publishing project
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9780989760744
    Unavailable
    Dan

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    • 5/5
      Dan takes a long time to get going, I admit. It's entertaining enough for the first hundred pages or so, as Melba is accused by the various men of small town Dan, and in the process we learn a little bit about the place. But then, yowzers.

      We turn out to be watching someone trying to piece together their consciousness as their self-consciousness falls to pieces. Melba is accused, among other things, of being or impersonating someone else, who may or may not have existed, but does have a grieving, insane husband. Her mother suggests that she's falling apart because she doesn't shop enough. If she shopped more, she'd have more things to build her personality with.

      She would be able to hold herself more firmly in the flow of time; one of most remarkable passages in the book lightly parodies Benjamin's 'angel of history' (the school principal is Principal Benjamin, I'm not getting this from nowhere). Melba's mother tells her that, one day, Melba is "going to see something startling and not in a good way. You'll see a piece of straw driven like a skewer through a man's neck by gale force winds... you'll throw your arm across your eyes and those little hairs [on her arms] will act like Velcro on your eyeballs... that's the future, Melba. That's what not meaning gets you, eyeballs on your arm. Why won't you buy depilatory creams? They smell wonderful, like scorched lemons. They're cheap. You never shop, Melba. It's killing you, not just in the future, right now."

      I admit, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing: theory-done-twee, irony with an emotional kick. I thought Ruocco might struggle to bring everything together at the end, but she succeeds perfectly, taking Melba back to her birth and the book, literally to its end. Dan turns out to be a kind of machine for making metaphors literally--including the idea, which I still find fascinating, that constructing a narrative in time, and constructing a self in history, have a lot in common. But most importantly, what could be a real snow-globe novel--self-enclosed, disturbing nothing outside itself--turns out to be constantly pointing at the world we actually have to live in.