Finished: April 4, 2022
pp: 403
Author: Jeff Danielle
Other books: Wolf in White Van (read), Universal Harvester (haven’t read)
Rating: Very good!
Some thoughts:
It’s the unexpected phrase, I think, that first gets you. You might think it’s the full-throatedness of it all, and maybe you’re right. There’s certainly something undeniable about driving along mountain roads with your friends yelling (not singing) the chorus to ‘No Children,’ but that’s folly. That’s youth. The thing that sticks with you, that you keep coming back for more is the way he drops a line like “let this whole town hear your knuckles crack,” and how immediately it captures a world. It’s the best kind melodrama. It’s the kind of thing that leads one earnest 20-year old to tell another about the time he cried at a live performance of “Jenny.” It’s not the kind of thing that always spells success for literary fiction, something that has a not uncomplicated relationship with earnestness. And for me, it’s the kind of thing I love in music, but tend to shy away from in the books I read.
Flash back a few years to me reading Wolf in White Van and being unable to separate the idea of the Mountain Goats from the book I was reading. I treated it like a 200-page song instead of a novel. In my defense, I once spent an afternoon staring at the Bob Dylan book (Tarantula, or something), and from a medium-perspective that thing is neither fish nor fowl, so I had some scarring when it came to singer-songwriters I could do an okay impression of who decided to write books. It just missed me. I was in the minority, but I couldn’t see it as anything but a novelty.
If I’m being honest my skepticism about Darnielle as an author had a lot to do with the long and mostly inauspicious history of people who are successful in one medium trying their hand at another. Most hilariously, you see this with actor’s vanity musical projects (ie Dogstar, The Ordinary Fear of God, Modern West, et al): acts that when I see clips of them have the same energy as a middle school band performance. You don’t need this, Russel! You’re already famous, Kevin! This just feels desperate.
That being said, there are a few important exceptions to this. Some of them are real, some of them I’d like to manifest:
- Steve Martin playing banjo: far be it from me to tell Steve Martin what to do
- Viola Davis decides to write some crime novels
- Idris Elba gets into gardening and becomes a presenter on British gardening shows
- George Saunders gives a black metal album a go
Clearly, there’s a difference with Jeff Darnielle. The jump from writing songs to books is certainly more reasonable than Sean Penn successfully writing a satirical novel called Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. Still, there was a hurdle for me. One I’m happy to have cleared.
When “Getting into Knives” came out last year, I connected with it in a way I hadn’t the last few Mountain Goats albums, playing it on repeat for weeks. So the pump was primed when this book came out. And once I started Devin House it’s so immediately and inarguably a NOVEL that I couldn’t do the dumb thing I did with WIWV and treat it like a song, or something that that has pop because of who wrote it.
The way the book plays with genre is one of the most immediately compelling things about it. You get some of the sizzle of true crime while also pulling at the strings of its conventions. It also pulls off the trick of seeming to be about one thing while secretly being about another: one of the most satisfying things when done well. I’m going to write more about that later, and go more in depth on what are some of the really impressive things going on throughout. For now, I’d close with a hearty recommendation and by reminding you, dear reader, that there are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can’t buy Golden Boy peanuts.