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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Teenage tribulations: Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

11/6/2015

6 Comments

 
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“Sometimes I have trouble finding the edges,” says the narrator, Sean, on page 9 of this unusual and deeply moving debut novel. So far, all I know about him is that he returned from hospital to his parents’ home with painful skin grafts and that, as a young child, obsessed with comic books, he’d imagined himself a throne in his grandparents’ garden, declaring himself King Conan. You’re not the only one, I might have replied. Sharing none of his tastes in TV, music and games, I didn’t hold up much hope of venturing beyond the edges of a novel that spirals round and round its subject but, when I did, I was deeply impressed. While preferring to eschew spoilers, despite the evidence that they are more likely to enhance the reading pleasure than destroy it, I can’t convey my enthusiasm for the novel without wheeling towards its centre, so read on at your own risk.

Sean Phillips’ appearance is beyond ugly; facially disfigured since the age of seventeen, he rarely ventures out, avoiding the burden of other people’s reactions (p84):

People don’t expect to meet me. They don’t know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were.

Lance and Carrie have also had their teenage lives destroyed, but it turns out that they weren’t party to the incident that so dreadfully damaged Sean, but overly eager participants in a post-apocalyptic role-play adventure game, Trace Italian, of which Sean is both inventor and administrator. Carrie’s parents try to prove Sean accountable through the courts, echoing his own parents’ search for meaning in his self-destructive behaviour (p97):

My parents had their own version of it, which was linear; it told the story about me staying up late and reading things and watching things that told me to do something awful, staring too long at the static screen.

Their attempt “to draw some lesson from a place where no lessons were” (p121) contributes to Sean’s estrangement from them, reminding me of Matt’s response to the police’s efforts at meaning-making in Christopher Prendergast’s novel, Septembers.

The novel’s title comes from the supposed satanic messages contained in rock music, audible only if the record were played backwards (p104). It might serve as a reminder of the perils and fragility of adolescence, or perhaps it’s meant as a reflection of the paranoia that has always existed around youth culture. Amid the guns and the gaming, the exploration of fandom and the trauma of disfigurement, I found in this novel one of the most moving evocations of the teenage experience, “a hallway full of doors leading to dark places” (p52), an in between place with a permeable boundary between the real and the imaginary, where meaning is obscure (p107):

I sift and rake dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jelly-fish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.

Thanks to Granta books for my review copy.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
13/6/2015 01:01:11 am

This one sounds interesting, Anne, if only because you didn't expect to get further than the edges and were then impressed by the detail of the story and I think, characterisation. That must mean that your knowledge of psychology 'passed' the development of the characters, I'm assuming. I find the last quote rather significant and haunting - Sean's knowledge that nothing made him tick. It's a bit scary - the purposelessness of life - and I think, perhaps, one reason many clutter their lives with busy-ness and must-dos. (Or perhaps am I just talking for myself?)

Reply
Annecdotist
14/6/2015 06:29:00 am

That right, Norah, I was totally convinced by the characterisation, especially Sean. Scary and bleak as his perspective is, I think it's very realistic, especially regarding the challenge of adolescence. It a difficult journey, or can be in the circumstances, I always want to give parents a medal when they get their kids through it safely.
And I agree entirely, filling our lives with activity can be a defence against the meaninglessness that lurks underneath – I suppose if that's the human condition, the best we can do is find that the kind of clutter that at least give us an illusion of meaning!
I thought this was an excellent novel for anyone who can bear connect with those difficult issues. Thanks so much for your comment.

Reply
Charli Mills
17/6/2015 04:00:52 pm

Another thought-provoking review, Anne. I'm trying to get stable ground beneath my feet, following several wobbling life incidents. This all collides to make me believe that clarity comes from the concrete situations (disfigurement, for example) and how we ultimately give meaning to the meaningless or define transitions that often fall short of definition. It is a talented writer that can unravel such then construct a story out of it.

Reply
Annecdotist
19/6/2015 10:31:32 am

Thanks, Charli, a lot going on for you right now.
Yeah, I was really impressed with the writing here, wanted him for my debut novelist Q&A but couldn't get any response unfortunately.

Reply
Charli Mills
19/6/2015 02:06:07 pm

Ah, well, perhaps he'll give you a delayed response. After all, our industry is fraught with delayed responses. :-)

Annecdotist
22/6/2015 06:54:21 am

If he does though, I might have to read the book again to formulate my questions!




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