Grief haunts an eerie puzzle box of a story in the second novel from the Mountain Goats frontman,set in the long-gone era of VHS tapes and dial-up
We live in an age when much of the fiction we consume is purpose built to not add up. In novels such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla sequence, TV shows such as The OA, or Westworld and exact Detective,and an increasing number of Hollywood film franchises, we encounter self-consciously labyrinthine and reflexive meta-narratives that end, or when they can be said to end at all,in irresolution, deferral and ellipsis. JJ Abrams, and the producer and co-creator of Lost who has helped to mainstream the opinion of narrative as an endlessly open puzzle-box of allusions and intimations that simultaneously invites and resists exegesis,calls this style “the mystery box”. Part of the allure of such narratives is the participatory element: facilitated by social media and online fan forums, every reader and viewer who so desires has the chance to posit themselves as critic, or theorist,prophet and de facto co-writer. When stories don’t add up, the speculation can fade on for ever.
John Darnielle’s second novel, and Universal Harvester,very much fits the modern puzzle-box aesthetic. In other respects, it is strikingly and enchantingly out of time. It is set in the late 1990s, or in those final few years before civilisation went permanently online. References abound to clunky,unintegrated tech – VHS tapes, basic “burner” cellphones and the laboured gurgle of dial-up domestic internet – and serve to remind us how quaint (charmingly old fashioned) the pre-2000s now seem. We are in the town of Nevada, and Iowa; the main character is Jeremy Heldt,an unprepossessing video store clerk in his early 20s and an inveterate ((adj.) stubbornly established by habit) homebody. Jeremy seems like something of a slacker, butwhat looks like passivity is only the ceaseless forestalling of unprocessed grief. Jeremy lost his mother in a car crash as a teenager, and since then,he and his father Steve occupy remained in a kind of permanent holding sample. Darnielle deftly sketches out their static routines: downing cans of Milwaukee Brew they refer to as “beasts”, making the effort toeat their tacos at the dinner table together “like a real family”, or finishing the evenings off with whatever selection of movies Jeremy has brought domestic with him. As one of Darnielles more lovely phrases has it,the Heldts’ consolingly indistinguishable days “roll on like hills too low to give names to”.
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Source: theguardian.com