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American Decameron
From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn's most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.
A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.
Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.
A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.
Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.
746 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
8 people are currently reading
326 people want to read
About the author
Mark Dunn
66 books211 followersMark Dunn is the author of several books and more than thirty full-length plays, a dozen of which have been published in acting edition.
Mark has received over 200 productions of his work for the stage throughout the world, with translations of his plays into French, Italian, Dutch and Hungarian. His play North Fork (later retitled Cabin Fever: A Texas Tragicomedy when it was picked up for publication by Samuel French) premiered at the New Jersey Repertory Company (NJRC) in 1999 and has since gone on to receive numerous productions throughout the U.S.
Mark is co-author with NJRC composer-in-residence Merek Royce Press of Octet: A Concert Play, which received its world premiere at NJRC in 2000. Two of his plays, Helen’s Most Favorite Day and Dix Tableaux, have gone on to publication and national licensing by Samuel French. His novels include the award-winning Ella Minnow Pea, Welcome to Higby, Ibid, the children’s novel The Calamitous Adventures of Rodney and Wayne, Under the Harrow and Feral Park.
Mark teaches creative writing and leads playwriting seminars around the country, in addition to serving as Vice President of the non-profit PULA (People United for Libraries in Africa), which he founded with his wife, Mary, in 2002.
(modified bio courtesy of http://njrep.org/playwrights.htm)
Mark has received over 200 productions of his work for the stage throughout the world, with translations of his plays into French, Italian, Dutch and Hungarian. His play North Fork (later retitled Cabin Fever: A Texas Tragicomedy when it was picked up for publication by Samuel French) premiered at the New Jersey Repertory Company (NJRC) in 1999 and has since gone on to receive numerous productions throughout the U.S.
Mark is co-author with NJRC composer-in-residence Merek Royce Press of Octet: A Concert Play, which received its world premiere at NJRC in 2000. Two of his plays, Helen’s Most Favorite Day and Dix Tableaux, have gone on to publication and national licensing by Samuel French. His novels include the award-winning Ella Minnow Pea, Welcome to Higby, Ibid, the children’s novel The Calamitous Adventures of Rodney and Wayne, Under the Harrow and Feral Park.
Mark teaches creative writing and leads playwriting seminars around the country, in addition to serving as Vice President of the non-profit PULA (People United for Libraries in Africa), which he founded with his wife, Mary, in 2002.
(modified bio courtesy of http://njrep.org/playwrights.htm)
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 14, 2012
2012
Creatively constipated in New Jersey
Maddie stares at her work monitor -- the third machine she's attempted her American Decameron review on, a review that has hit more brick walls than a driving-school vehicle -- with her fingers poised over the keyboard and ready for speedy transcription of all the ways she wants to gush about Mark Dunn's newest gift to the world, a gesture as fruitless as her fervent hopes that staring at a computer screen long enough will magically produce words.
"Fitting," she grumbles to herself, only half caring that her officemate (who's well-versed in her special breed of crazy) might overhear, "that a book comprising 100 stories would take 100 attempts to write about."
The joy of finally finishing a book in the face of natural disasters, a thankless job's busy season and other, more pleasant assorted things that prevent her from falling into what would be her ideal natural state of existence (i.e.: bookworm hermitage) waned considerably as the frustration of reviewing being a use-it-or-lose-it skill grew like... like.... like what, Maddie?
"Fucking similes," she mutters with an inappropriate degree of hatred, for Maddie is nothing if not a classy lady as her fondness for expletives shows. "Fucking stupid review. Why can't you just write yourself?"
She sighs as if the world were ending, then rereads the paltry dross she's managed thus far:
Mixed emotions always accompany the news that Mark Dunn is publishing a new book. On one hand, it's always a cause for celebration when one of my favorite living writers blesses the literary world with a new work; on the other, it's impossible to predict how much of an optimistic cock tease the initial expected publication date is versus the harsh reality of the much more distant one. Fortunately, this is one of those times I was rewarded for not being a technological curmudgeon: While the hardcover's expected publication date has jumped around the 2012 calendar like an overzealous child playing hopscotch, the Kindle edition was there to ease the terminally delayed gratification that's so inherently intertwined with the advent of a new Dunn offering.
"Too boring," Maddie says to herself while shaking her head in self-disgust and not caring that she probably looks like Tippi Hedren to anyone neither inside her head nor in front of her computer screen.
Still, experience has taught her that nothing plows through writer's block quite like hammering out whatever comes to mind so she continues with the unsatisfying direction her review has taken:
I'm never really sure what to expect from Dunn as a writer so I suppose the surprise release dates are rather fitting for a scribe whose playwright and novelist hats both suit him to equal success. As far as Dunn goes, this ambitious book is markedly lacking a kooky hook: It's not an epistolary novel that takes increasing liberties with spelling as the available alphabet diminishes, it's not a biography rendered entirely in footnotes, it's not the tale of a modern-day Dickensian society sequestered in Pennsylvania or extraterrestrial-fearing neighbors sequestered in each other's homes. What it is is 100 individual stories that serve as a better American history lesson than any American history textbook not written by Howard Zinn (though it's definitely more life-affirming than Zinn's fare).
On a totally superficial level, one could erroneously call this a short-story collection but it really isn't (much to the relief of my indomitable but ill-founded bias against short stories). Even if the bookending chapters didn't tie everything together by showing how many of the characters populating Dunn's 100 American tales have crossed paths to (mostly positively) results, the overriding theme of each story being part of something bigger is present without being intrusive. And it's the way that the macro- and microcosms play against each other that highlight my favorite thing about Dunn's writing, which isn't his snazzy word play and his clever presentation -- it's the palpable humanity and innate goodness he infuses into the staggering majority of his characters. More on that in a sec because, really, who needs to organize their thoughts?
This is where Maddie lets loose an unladylike but totally characteristic snort over her own blatant cop-out. The thing is, she doesn't want this review to become a gush-fest about how the characters in this book, the forward of which betrays the non-fictitious nature of much of the cast parading through this book's 700-some pages, give her hope for humanity, just as Dunn's books and plays usually do. But Maddie is also deeply cynical about the goodness of people, despite her desperate (and, admittedly, more successful than she had anticipated) efforts to change her own mind. And she doesn't want anyone to know that her soft heart has been bleeding more than usual lately.
Dunn covers a lot of ground, both in terms of time (all of the 20th century, occasionally punctuated by lapses into the past and flash-forwards to the future) and geography (50 states, one district, various airspaces and bodies of water -- including at least two oceans -- and Botswana). This is a day in the life of an American year as seen by seemingly inconsequential, everyday folks. Some of the personal stories collide with the bigger front-page stories (like journalists investigating the plausibility that the Wright brothers' incredible flying machine is a credible, airborne success), some are outright influenced by them (like Lusitania survivors bonding over an accidental encounter) but most illustrate how history affects people and how people affect history incidentally. Humanity and history are the main characters here, and Dunn breathes life into both intangibles with great deals of sympathetic realism.
"But.... but... there's so much more to it than that!" Maddie almost exclaims, forgetting where she is in the throes of her needlessly intense internal battle. She sighs again, is briefly rocked back to reality as her coworker asks if she's okay, and finally concedes that she can't do in a Goodreads review what Mark Dunn's achieved with his daunting accomplishment of a far-reaching, far-sighted tome.
And she also admits that, like every other book she's read, this one was all about how she related to it, a justification she makes by telling herself that books do not exist in a vacuum and serve to delight, entertain, challenge and otherwise move readers. And what better way than by finding the human connection in a book that is, at its core, all about human connections.
She gets teary-eyed as she grapples with recounting the specific ways that the 1988 installment -- "Stouthearted in Florida," in which a teenage girl goes against her mother's wishes to sneak her ailing grandmother's lesbian lover into the hospital -- absolutely tore her up inside but abandons the effort, knowing that no one can express the gamut of inherent goodness and love of which people are capable as well as Dunn illustrated with this and all of his other works.
"Fuck this," Maddie proclaims, wiping at her eyes as surreptitiously as possible before emerging from the safe blockade that the monitor allows her. "I'm going to lunch."
Creatively constipated in New Jersey
Maddie stares at her work monitor -- the third machine she's attempted her American Decameron review on, a review that has hit more brick walls than a driving-school vehicle -- with her fingers poised over the keyboard and ready for speedy transcription of all the ways she wants to gush about Mark Dunn's newest gift to the world, a gesture as fruitless as her fervent hopes that staring at a computer screen long enough will magically produce words.
"Fitting," she grumbles to herself, only half caring that her officemate (who's well-versed in her special breed of crazy) might overhear, "that a book comprising 100 stories would take 100 attempts to write about."
The joy of finally finishing a book in the face of natural disasters, a thankless job's busy season and other, more pleasant assorted things that prevent her from falling into what would be her ideal natural state of existence (i.e.: bookworm hermitage) waned considerably as the frustration of reviewing being a use-it-or-lose-it skill grew like... like.... like what, Maddie?
"Fucking similes," she mutters with an inappropriate degree of hatred, for Maddie is nothing if not a classy lady as her fondness for expletives shows. "Fucking stupid review. Why can't you just write yourself?"
She sighs as if the world were ending, then rereads the paltry dross she's managed thus far:
Mixed emotions always accompany the news that Mark Dunn is publishing a new book. On one hand, it's always a cause for celebration when one of my favorite living writers blesses the literary world with a new work; on the other, it's impossible to predict how much of an optimistic cock tease the initial expected publication date is versus the harsh reality of the much more distant one. Fortunately, this is one of those times I was rewarded for not being a technological curmudgeon: While the hardcover's expected publication date has jumped around the 2012 calendar like an overzealous child playing hopscotch, the Kindle edition was there to ease the terminally delayed gratification that's so inherently intertwined with the advent of a new Dunn offering.
"Too boring," Maddie says to herself while shaking her head in self-disgust and not caring that she probably looks like Tippi Hedren to anyone neither inside her head nor in front of her computer screen.
Still, experience has taught her that nothing plows through writer's block quite like hammering out whatever comes to mind so she continues with the unsatisfying direction her review has taken:
I'm never really sure what to expect from Dunn as a writer so I suppose the surprise release dates are rather fitting for a scribe whose playwright and novelist hats both suit him to equal success. As far as Dunn goes, this ambitious book is markedly lacking a kooky hook: It's not an epistolary novel that takes increasing liberties with spelling as the available alphabet diminishes, it's not a biography rendered entirely in footnotes, it's not the tale of a modern-day Dickensian society sequestered in Pennsylvania or extraterrestrial-fearing neighbors sequestered in each other's homes. What it is is 100 individual stories that serve as a better American history lesson than any American history textbook not written by Howard Zinn (though it's definitely more life-affirming than Zinn's fare).
On a totally superficial level, one could erroneously call this a short-story collection but it really isn't (much to the relief of my indomitable but ill-founded bias against short stories). Even if the bookending chapters didn't tie everything together by showing how many of the characters populating Dunn's 100 American tales have crossed paths to (mostly positively) results, the overriding theme of each story being part of something bigger is present without being intrusive. And it's the way that the macro- and microcosms play against each other that highlight my favorite thing about Dunn's writing, which isn't his snazzy word play and his clever presentation -- it's the palpable humanity and innate goodness he infuses into the staggering majority of his characters. More on that in a sec because, really, who needs to organize their thoughts?
This is where Maddie lets loose an unladylike but totally characteristic snort over her own blatant cop-out. The thing is, she doesn't want this review to become a gush-fest about how the characters in this book, the forward of which betrays the non-fictitious nature of much of the cast parading through this book's 700-some pages, give her hope for humanity, just as Dunn's books and plays usually do. But Maddie is also deeply cynical about the goodness of people, despite her desperate (and, admittedly, more successful than she had anticipated) efforts to change her own mind. And she doesn't want anyone to know that her soft heart has been bleeding more than usual lately.
Dunn covers a lot of ground, both in terms of time (all of the 20th century, occasionally punctuated by lapses into the past and flash-forwards to the future) and geography (50 states, one district, various airspaces and bodies of water -- including at least two oceans -- and Botswana). This is a day in the life of an American year as seen by seemingly inconsequential, everyday folks. Some of the personal stories collide with the bigger front-page stories (like journalists investigating the plausibility that the Wright brothers' incredible flying machine is a credible, airborne success), some are outright influenced by them (like Lusitania survivors bonding over an accidental encounter) but most illustrate how history affects people and how people affect history incidentally. Humanity and history are the main characters here, and Dunn breathes life into both intangibles with great deals of sympathetic realism.
"But.... but... there's so much more to it than that!" Maddie almost exclaims, forgetting where she is in the throes of her needlessly intense internal battle. She sighs again, is briefly rocked back to reality as her coworker asks if she's okay, and finally concedes that she can't do in a Goodreads review what Mark Dunn's achieved with his daunting accomplishment of a far-reaching, far-sighted tome.
And she also admits that, like every other book she's read, this one was all about how she related to it, a justification she makes by telling herself that books do not exist in a vacuum and serve to delight, entertain, challenge and otherwise move readers. And what better way than by finding the human connection in a book that is, at its core, all about human connections.
She gets teary-eyed as she grapples with recounting the specific ways that the 1988 installment -- "Stouthearted in Florida," in which a teenage girl goes against her mother's wishes to sneak her ailing grandmother's lesbian lover into the hospital -- absolutely tore her up inside but abandons the effort, knowing that no one can express the gamut of inherent goodness and love of which people are capable as well as Dunn illustrated with this and all of his other works.
"Fuck this," Maddie proclaims, wiping at her eyes as surreptitiously as possible before emerging from the safe blockade that the monitor allows her. "I'm going to lunch."
Did Not Finish
November 28, 2012Abandoned -- see comment 11 below for an explanation. I won't officially review this since I didn't finish it.
April 16, 2020
Somehow I managed to get to the end. 100 very short (average length 7 pages) for each year of the 20th century. Too short to develop any characters and without any particular punchy ending these stories just seemed very samey and not particularly interesting. The final story makes an effort to mention something from many (all?) of the preceding stories which added nothing whatsoever
February 4, 2013
Mark Dunn has blown my mind again! Covering an entire century in American history, he brings the reader a unique story and voice for each year. It would be quite possible for a reader to think that this book is an anthology, as Dunn is able to change his narrative style so significantly that every story is distinct and special. This is part of why it was so easy to read a book that is over 700 pages long without getting bored. Finally, while every story is separate, he manages to tie them all together, showing how the country has changed over 100 years, but in the end our lives can be tied together in ways we can't imagine. This may seem like a daunting read, but I highly recommend this to readers who enjoy unique writing styles.
February 7, 2014
American Decameron by Mark Dunn (author of Ella Minnow Pea) 100 stories over 100 years set in all 50 states .
From a Brit this reads like the history of America in the last century that you didn't know about. Told in stories reflecting the times and great events in a way that makes you think about them in a different way. Pearl Harbour is one of my favorites.
Fabulous.
From a Brit this reads like the history of America in the last century that you didn't know about. Told in stories reflecting the times and great events in a way that makes you think about them in a different way. Pearl Harbour is one of my favorites.
Fabulous.
March 22, 2013
I gave it one star only because I didn't finish reading it. After about the first 10 stories or so I knew it would be a chore for me to get through. I've read a lot of short stories that are much more engaging and better written than the ones I found in this book.
August 5, 2023
I LOVED this book. Each individual story was amazing (my personal favorite was the story from 1946 it spoke to my soul, I also loved 1904, 1969, and OFC the fantastic 2000 story). It tied everything together so perfectly and I was amazed at all of the variety between stories- some of them were hilarious, some made me cry, some were touching, and some were frankly weird. I loved this book so much, and the last bit was so hopeful and made me imagine all the wonderful things the character will do in her life. This book was perfect, extremely impressive, and so so clever. I wouldn't change a thing.
January 14, 2023
Huh. While I was reading this, I thought only SOME of the stories were related to events that actually happened in the year being chronicled, but it turns out that virtually ALL of the stories were based on real events. I found it odd that both 1963 and 1968 passed without mention of the JFK, Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy assassinations, but other than that, this book does an amazing job of showing day-to-day life during the 20th century.
November 2, 2023
Short stories are always hit or miss. Some really good ones, some kind of bad ones. I had never heard of the Italian work upon which this is based, The Decameron. I didn't really feel like this was so great I need to recommend it to anyone. I'm not sorry I read it.
February 5, 2024
If you're a short story lover or an American history buff, this book is for you. There are some real gems in here.
December 13, 2013
The best stories here are kernels that fit snugly in their hulls. That is, this is a collection of sketches, and sketches are, by definition, softly-lashed glimpses into a moment or two. If your aims are too ambitious for any one piece, it can feel both overstuffed and frustratingly incomplete. That happens here in places: some pieces would benefit from being separated from this project, and greatly fleshed out, while others - not many - felt too slight or undercooked.
That may be the nature of a book like this: 100 sketches into a sprawling century. Dunn uses voice, idiom, and period detail beautifully much of the time, while an odd story might suffer from indistinction.
Another bug is Dunn's tendency to wink through his stories, particularly as he's wrapping them up - just-so details, tidy (or even glib) conclusions, or straight-up editorialization. His hand can weigh a bit heavy at times.
That may be the nature of a book like this: 100 sketches into a sprawling century. Dunn uses voice, idiom, and period detail beautifully much of the time, while an odd story might suffer from indistinction.
Another bug is Dunn's tendency to wink through his stories, particularly as he's wrapping them up - just-so details, tidy (or even glib) conclusions, or straight-up editorialization. His hand can weigh a bit heavy at times.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews