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Duplex
Mary and Eddie are meant for each other—but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer's car will speed down Mary's street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. In Duplex, Kathryn Davis, whom the Chicago Tribune has called "one of the most inventive novelists at work today," has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there's no telling where you might come out.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 3, 2013
85 people are currently reading
6371 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Davis
47 books182 followersKathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 336 reviews
April 8, 2020
this book is very disorienting. and i liked it, i think, but it is the kind of book you need to read at least twice. in this book, davis is very fond of manipulating the reader, making sure there is never a point where you feel entirely comfortable reading it, confident that you know what is going on. she will drop a portion of backstory, an unfamiliar word, an imagined folklore, disingenuously, as though we know what she's talking about, only to provide the explanation several chapters on, when you have all but forgotten the context of the initial drop. it's a very tricksy book that never lets you forget you are being led.
usually i love kathryn davis; this is my fifth book by her, but this one i only liked. at the start, it reminded me of Enchanted Night - which is a short story cycle centered around many characters living one night on a suburban street, with a little bit of magic, but it is a much more approachable, accessible magic than this one, which really just flings you about with no regard for your well-being. i know that if i were to reread it, it would be a better experience, with all the story mapped out in my memory. and i may still, and soon, because there are moments of beautiful prose here, interleaved with all the slipstream bewilderment, about the ways in which girls come of age, form relationships, fail to meet expectations, and settle for less than they should.
also, robots.
so - know what you're getting into - a dark surreal, occasionally erotic fantasy where things are at once very familiar and incredibly, jarringly other. and then go read The Walking Tour.
come to my blog!
usually i love kathryn davis; this is my fifth book by her, but this one i only liked. at the start, it reminded me of Enchanted Night - which is a short story cycle centered around many characters living one night on a suburban street, with a little bit of magic, but it is a much more approachable, accessible magic than this one, which really just flings you about with no regard for your well-being. i know that if i were to reread it, it would be a better experience, with all the story mapped out in my memory. and i may still, and soon, because there are moments of beautiful prose here, interleaved with all the slipstream bewilderment, about the ways in which girls come of age, form relationships, fail to meet expectations, and settle for less than they should.
also, robots.
so - know what you're getting into - a dark surreal, occasionally erotic fantasy where things are at once very familiar and incredibly, jarringly other. and then go read The Walking Tour.
come to my blog!
July 12, 2024
After finishing this book, I discovered that some of its chapters were previously published as standalone stories. I’m curious if I would’ve had the same reactions to those, separately, as I did to the whole. Maybe so, as I was enthralled from the beginning, as soon as I got an immediate glimmer of a theme that always appeals to me: sliding-door moments.
On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t have had the same reaction to separate chapters, as I’m also wondering if Mary and Eddie’s “exquisite bond” was threaded through later. For me, their story could be the emotional core and essence of the work, though in other ways it’s irrelevant to the world that’s built around it. And maybe that’s part of the point.
My only quibble — and for me it’s a big one because I am a baseball fan, so I guess it’s not just a quibble — is one clunky sentence that makes no sense, as is, with its description of the end of a game. Since the novel is surreal, fantastical and dreamlike, it almost feels petty to point out the mistake. But there’s also no reason for it to have been done “on purpose,” so I’ll pretend that it’s fixed..
Two book covers came up on my library Kindle copy and I don’t care for either very much. The one with the boy rowing a boat is sort of accurate to one important passage, but it eliminates the girl in the scene—and girls are (in)arguably the focus of the book. The other cover works in that there is a marriage between a young woman and a sorcerer (though the dog belongs to the other woman connected to the sorcerer), but its depiction of the couple seems too cartoonish.
The audiobook cover, however, evokes the story’s mood, as well as a character's painting that illustrates the town’s history—the Rain of Beads, the Horsewomen, and the Aquanauts—all of which is explained, more or less, in the narration of a somewhat older character, as listened to and commented upon by the book’s mostly unobtrusive younger narrator/writer.
My Goodreads stars reflect my fascination with this book. And that brings to my mind the character’s painting again—how her painted “real” stars connect sky to water with shimmery threads.
The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.
On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t have had the same reaction to separate chapters, as I’m also wondering if Mary and Eddie’s “exquisite bond” was threaded through later. For me, their story could be the emotional core and essence of the work, though in other ways it’s irrelevant to the world that’s built around it. And maybe that’s part of the point.
My only quibble — and for me it’s a big one because I am a baseball fan, so I guess it’s not just a quibble — is one clunky sentence that makes no sense, as is, with its description of the end of a game. Since the novel is surreal, fantastical and dreamlike, it almost feels petty to point out the mistake. But there’s also no reason for it to have been done “on purpose,” so I’ll pretend that it’s fixed..
Two book covers came up on my library Kindle copy and I don’t care for either very much. The one with the boy rowing a boat is sort of accurate to one important passage, but it eliminates the girl in the scene—and girls are (in)arguably the focus of the book. The other cover works in that there is a marriage between a young woman and a sorcerer (though the dog belongs to the other woman connected to the sorcerer), but its depiction of the couple seems too cartoonish.
The audiobook cover, however, evokes the story’s mood, as well as a character's painting that illustrates the town’s history—the Rain of Beads, the Horsewomen, and the Aquanauts—all of which is explained, more or less, in the narration of a somewhat older character, as listened to and commented upon by the book’s mostly unobtrusive younger narrator/writer.
My Goodreads stars reflect my fascination with this book. And that brings to my mind the character’s painting again—how her painted “real” stars connect sky to water with shimmery threads.
March 9, 2022
What a delight. The story zings along and you can either try to puzzle it out as you go or let it lead you where it will. Kathryn Davis has created a unique world in this novel and I was all in. It's the kind of story where the beginning of the sentence means something different by the time you get to the end of the sentence and for me this kind of writing is so refreshing and alive and delightful that I could spew many exclamation points after each of the sentences in this review.
For instance take this sentence on the first page--
She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn't have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.
Soon the story will reveal to you that it's taking place in a world of real people and sorcerers and robots, all living on the same street. Yeah. Why not?
For instance take this sentence on the first page--
She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn't have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.
Soon the story will reveal to you that it's taking place in a world of real people and sorcerers and robots, all living on the same street. Yeah. Why not?
November 26, 2013
I don't even know what to say. Reading the other reviews here, it seems like people are either in the "loved it" camp or the "hated it" camp and I'm squarely in the......"I don't even know what to say" camp. First off the writing is amazing - at once detached and cool and then intense and heartbreaking. The whole thing was strangely erotic. Each individual section added up to ....something (though I'm not sure what) but none of those sections added up to a novel. There was no real forward progression and at times it felt like Ms. Davis was just writing whatever suited her that day....again, not that that's a bad thing. I can't think of a single person that I could recommend this to and be able to predict their response. There's sorcerers and robots that are people but really shaped like needles and four horsewomen and sea creatures and souls kept in beans, except there is also none of that because it's a cast of characters, mainly young women, living in a series of duplexes in what feels like the 1950s. I definitely read SOMETHING, because I turned the pages and the words went by and some story was told though I think it was only told to my subconscious and conversely, I read NOTHING and it was all strange Puckish dream.
December 28, 2014
This is hands-down the weirdest, and curiously one of the most affecting, books I have had the privilege to read in 2014. Impressive and incendiary. Overall the structure and tone reminded me of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: a series of loosely connected and intertwined stories/tales/visions set in a mythical world of the imagination.
That world is either modern suburbia, a virtual reality simulation, a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by giant tsunamis, an old age home/convent, a future utopia where robots are ubiquitous … there is even mention of a Space Drift near the end, that is able to fold time and space, which reminded me of M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (instead of a cat here we have a red dachshund).
A vital clue is provided towards the end, where a hinge is described as “not only being the place where a real scallop attached itself to its shell, but also the place where you could go forward and back with equal ease”.
There is a lot of mention of doors, openings, even wormholes, and neologisms like ‘dactilo ports’, while the titular duplex is described at the beginning as having properties “that are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.”
What I loved about Duplex is how it reminded me of a time when I was much younger and I perceived reading as a dangerous, even illicit, activity that was anti-social and took me out of the world as I knew it.
It reminded me of the thrill of ordering books from storage in our home town’s legal-deposit library that had not been taken out in years, feeling that not only had I rediscovered these lost books, but that by reading them, somehow activating their magic...
Duplex also reminded me of the brain freeze I would often encounter in reading new authors, and attempting a book that I knew was beyond my teenage comprehension (elastic as it may have been at that time), and being dimly aware of a vast realm of ideas and feelings just beyond my grasp.
If you read a lot of SF and po-mo or contemporary fiction, you are likely to take to Duplex like a duck to water, if you have not discovered Davis already (this is my first time reading her).
This book really reinvigorated my sense of wonder in reading: as a process of discovery (and rediscovery); as a contract with the author to educate and entertain me in equal measure; and as an emotional and cathartic journey, where the heartbeat of the story is much more valuable than the narrative footprint.
That world is either modern suburbia, a virtual reality simulation, a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by giant tsunamis, an old age home/convent, a future utopia where robots are ubiquitous … there is even mention of a Space Drift near the end, that is able to fold time and space, which reminded me of M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (instead of a cat here we have a red dachshund).
A vital clue is provided towards the end, where a hinge is described as “not only being the place where a real scallop attached itself to its shell, but also the place where you could go forward and back with equal ease”.
There is a lot of mention of doors, openings, even wormholes, and neologisms like ‘dactilo ports’, while the titular duplex is described at the beginning as having properties “that are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.”
What I loved about Duplex is how it reminded me of a time when I was much younger and I perceived reading as a dangerous, even illicit, activity that was anti-social and took me out of the world as I knew it.
It reminded me of the thrill of ordering books from storage in our home town’s legal-deposit library that had not been taken out in years, feeling that not only had I rediscovered these lost books, but that by reading them, somehow activating their magic...
Duplex also reminded me of the brain freeze I would often encounter in reading new authors, and attempting a book that I knew was beyond my teenage comprehension (elastic as it may have been at that time), and being dimly aware of a vast realm of ideas and feelings just beyond my grasp.
If you read a lot of SF and po-mo or contemporary fiction, you are likely to take to Duplex like a duck to water, if you have not discovered Davis already (this is my first time reading her).
This book really reinvigorated my sense of wonder in reading: as a process of discovery (and rediscovery); as a contract with the author to educate and entertain me in equal measure; and as an emotional and cathartic journey, where the heartbeat of the story is much more valuable than the narrative footprint.
July 22, 2013
A big " wow" for Kathryn Davis' new book. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a galley and as soon as I picked it up, I read straight through to the end and then began all over again. In less than 200 pages, Davis has managed to create a world that feels almost familiar, but utterly strange and even unsettling (in a good way!). She layers suburban love story, myth, fairy tale, and a dose of sci-fi distopia into a kaleidoscopic story that kept me slightly off-kilter and off balance, wondering always how the world would shift next. The cover of my copy says "Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there's no telling where you might come out."
Her sentences are gorgeous. How about this? "It was a late afternoon in the month of October—the "Column of the Year" as the robots called it, the month's thick almost substantive yellow light holding the rest of the year aloft above darkness lapping at its feet." I couldn't stop underlining. Her transitions between inner and outer worlds amazing. I'd be reading along not realizing I had slipped inside some character's thoughts until I was shocked back into the outer world by the roar of an engine or the wag or a dog's tail.
I wish I were a good enough writer to do justice to this wonderful book, to get everyone to pick it up and get lost inside it like I did. I can say, in many ways it reminded me of another Graywolf Press favorite, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, minus the brutality and the Irish lilt. It's the kind of book that makes reading fun, completely unpredictable, sweeping you off your feet into a world all its own. Rush right out and get it when it comes out in early September!
Her sentences are gorgeous. How about this? "It was a late afternoon in the month of October—the "Column of the Year" as the robots called it, the month's thick almost substantive yellow light holding the rest of the year aloft above darkness lapping at its feet." I couldn't stop underlining. Her transitions between inner and outer worlds amazing. I'd be reading along not realizing I had slipped inside some character's thoughts until I was shocked back into the outer world by the roar of an engine or the wag or a dog's tail.
I wish I were a good enough writer to do justice to this wonderful book, to get everyone to pick it up and get lost inside it like I did. I can say, in many ways it reminded me of another Graywolf Press favorite, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, minus the brutality and the Irish lilt. It's the kind of book that makes reading fun, completely unpredictable, sweeping you off your feet into a world all its own. Rush right out and get it when it comes out in early September!
November 27, 2019
I have no idea what I'm reading yet, but it is perfect. These are the suburbs I remember, not the undifferentiated box rows of Long Island, but wild and unpredictable spaces edged in dense trees and empty lots. Somewhere in the woods, large and unknowable animals move through half-collapsed barn structures and leap over ravines studded with fallen washing machines.
But now I'm falling into associative reminiscence. None of that is actually in the book, but the feeling of pure mysterious possibility. Here, instead, is a sample passage:
This is the territory of the perfect unpredictable sentences sculpted by those two great Williamses, Diane and Joy, but turning directly into an existential dread edged in the particularly charged occult that lurks in the most terminally mundane situations. Have I ever wanted anything more?
***
Later:
My initial sense of this was that the atmosphere, and general web of narrativity-as-atmosphere, was more important than any traditional linear narrative, and this is essentially true throughout. You can jump in almost anywhere and get a reasonable sense of how Davis' universe operates. Which makes me all the more vaguely disappointed with the actual life-line linearity of the novel's structure. Not that this throughline is in any way more important than anything else here, which is to say ultimately not all that important, but I do believe that even greater temporal uncertainty and dissolution of forward progression would have been just fine and would have felt truer to the experience of the story. Not to say that this wasn't excellent, though -- it just came so close to some half-formed ideal I'd been searching for without knowing. Excitingly, this reservation leaves open the possibility of loving some other Davis novel even more in the near future. Which one will it be?!
But now I'm falling into associative reminiscence. None of that is actually in the book, but the feeling of pure mysterious possibility. Here, instead, is a sample passage:
I wish this was a different story. The vessels sailed and sailed and eventually they fell off the edge. You can have all the information in the world and what good does it do you? The edge of the world is a real place; when you have no soul there are no limits. There was a game everyone used to play at birthday parties called musical chairs. A parent would put a record on the player and cheerful music would start up, disguising the fact that someone was about to be cast into the outer dark where the fairies live.
This is the territory of the perfect unpredictable sentences sculpted by those two great Williamses, Diane and Joy, but turning directly into an existential dread edged in the particularly charged occult that lurks in the most terminally mundane situations. Have I ever wanted anything more?
***
Later:
My initial sense of this was that the atmosphere, and general web of narrativity-as-atmosphere, was more important than any traditional linear narrative, and this is essentially true throughout. You can jump in almost anywhere and get a reasonable sense of how Davis' universe operates. Which makes me all the more vaguely disappointed with the actual life-line linearity of the novel's structure. Not that this throughline is in any way more important than anything else here, which is to say ultimately not all that important, but I do believe that even greater temporal uncertainty and dissolution of forward progression would have been just fine and would have felt truer to the experience of the story. Not to say that this wasn't excellent, though -- it just came so close to some half-formed ideal I'd been searching for without knowing. Excitingly, this reservation leaves open the possibility of loving some other Davis novel even more in the near future. Which one will it be?!
January 3, 2014
2.5 stars. Too willfully, lazily oblique to be enjoyable. I can appreciate a book that defies comprehension, refuses to connect the dots, or otherwise demands significant heavy lifting from the reader. Genet and Jarman have taught us all that excrutiating or downright illegible works can still be epiphanaic for the reader/viewer. But there has to be some sense in the writing that the great imponderable something just beyond my readerly reach is worth actually reaching out for. I didn't get that feeling here. I didn't even get the feeling that there WAS anything there, or that it was in reach of anybody (Davis herself included). Sure, there was something oblique being said about mythology and storytelling and how our culture only knows how to raise little girls to become fucked up little women, but it's all been said before -- better, more clearly, with less threads left abandoned, and with a hell of a lot less pussyfooting around.
May 25, 2017
Whoa. Disorienting and compelling, with language that's beautiful and off-putting all at once. Defies description, because I'm not Kathryn Davis. In a nutshell, it centres on lives on a street of duplexes and sycamores, at some undefined time which seems like the 1950s or 1960s, but your understanding of what surrounds the participants keeps being augmented by oddities - the robots who live in some of the houses, the sound of raptors in the sky, scows overhead, the sorcerer Body-without-Soul who speeds down the street in his silver car. Time and space fold and do strange things, a child is 'born' from a Yellow Bear and has a port in the side of her head, a teacher rides away on a pony.
I'm not entirely sure what I just read but can't stop thinking about it. It says interesting things about girls' lives and storytelling and how we adapt and what jars us, and all kinds of other things. I want to get my own copy so I can go back.
I'm not entirely sure what I just read but can't stop thinking about it. It says interesting things about girls' lives and storytelling and how we adapt and what jars us, and all kinds of other things. I want to get my own copy so I can go back.
January 3, 2023
Okay, so this book will be hard to describe. But then, I prefer stories which aren't entirely straightforward. This one fits that bill. Do you like extremely surreal weird fiction? If you do, this book will be perfect for you.
The narrative is very fluid and nonlinear. Not only is time slippery, even the shape and character of the setting changes, the people most of all, mainly because some have no souls, some are robots, and even the regular folks have irregular experiences. There's a definite benefit for the reader in approaching this loosely. There's mystery, magic, surprising blips of violence, bursts of eroticism, and a confusing timeline of events which underscores the meaninglessness of time, aging, seasons, divisions of day and night, and even existence itself, at least in the ways we usually define it in our attempts to order the world.
My head is spinning a little, just like the weightless exhilarating feeling one experiences after exiting a carnival ride.
The narrative is very fluid and nonlinear. Not only is time slippery, even the shape and character of the setting changes, the people most of all, mainly because some have no souls, some are robots, and even the regular folks have irregular experiences. There's a definite benefit for the reader in approaching this loosely. There's mystery, magic, surprising blips of violence, bursts of eroticism, and a confusing timeline of events which underscores the meaninglessness of time, aging, seasons, divisions of day and night, and even existence itself, at least in the ways we usually define it in our attempts to order the world.
My head is spinning a little, just like the weightless exhilarating feeling one experiences after exiting a carnival ride.
October 14, 2016
Girls’/women’s bodily horror is so viscerally explored in this novel – metaphorically and otherwise (“It wasn’t like being torn to pieces, because pieces are big. It was like having the smallest parts of your body like the corpuscles and peptides and nuclei and follicles rip loose from one another, every single one of them.”) The territory made me think of Megan Abbott’s The Fever but this is so much richer. I wouldn’t have guessed from the cover that this novel had robots, a sorcerer, fairy tales, ontological horror, and sentences that I re-read to understand and appreciate. And how fascinating that most of the professional critics’ reviewing it based their reviews on their personal reading experiences (e.g., see Lynda Barry in the NYT “you find yourself lost; you read the sentence four times . . You think you know what this about …..). This would make a crazy-good discussion.
December 23, 2013
I'd rate this 2.5 stars.
Have you ever woken up from a dream and wondered, "What just happened?"
Dreams (at least mine) rarely follow linear patterns—there's a little reality mixed in with people from different aspects of my life, usually with a healthy dose of psychedelia for good measure. (If you've ever wondered whether you can justifiably be angry at someone for what they did to you in a dream, try explaining to a person you're mad at them for borrowing your car and parking it in the refrigerator, and see how they react.)
Reading Kathryn Davis' Duplex was a lot like walking into the middle of someone else's really bizarre dream. It's interesting and dizzyingly creative and Davis' storytelling ability was pretty magical and psychedelic throughout. It's less a novel and more a collection of interconnected short stories that take place at different times, but they feature the same characters—a powerful and seductive sorcerer; Miss Vicks, an elementary school teacher who is in love with the sorcerer; a family of robots who don't always appear human to other people; and Mary and Eddie, childhood sweethearts whose lives are forever changed by the strangeness around them.
If you're a fan of dreamy, fantastical fiction that doesn't quite flow in a typical way, where the plot doesn't quite jell and it's hard to pin down exactly what the book is about, then Duplex may be for you. While I enjoy some fantasy and nontraditional fiction, this book was a little too out there for me, but Davis is a very compelling writer, so while I was a bit confused and wondered what it all meant, I was still dazzled from time to time by her use of language and evocative imagery.
Very intriguing, but it's a book you have to work through.
Have you ever woken up from a dream and wondered, "What just happened?"
Dreams (at least mine) rarely follow linear patterns—there's a little reality mixed in with people from different aspects of my life, usually with a healthy dose of psychedelia for good measure. (If you've ever wondered whether you can justifiably be angry at someone for what they did to you in a dream, try explaining to a person you're mad at them for borrowing your car and parking it in the refrigerator, and see how they react.)
Reading Kathryn Davis' Duplex was a lot like walking into the middle of someone else's really bizarre dream. It's interesting and dizzyingly creative and Davis' storytelling ability was pretty magical and psychedelic throughout. It's less a novel and more a collection of interconnected short stories that take place at different times, but they feature the same characters—a powerful and seductive sorcerer; Miss Vicks, an elementary school teacher who is in love with the sorcerer; a family of robots who don't always appear human to other people; and Mary and Eddie, childhood sweethearts whose lives are forever changed by the strangeness around them.
If you're a fan of dreamy, fantastical fiction that doesn't quite flow in a typical way, where the plot doesn't quite jell and it's hard to pin down exactly what the book is about, then Duplex may be for you. While I enjoy some fantasy and nontraditional fiction, this book was a little too out there for me, but Davis is a very compelling writer, so while I was a bit confused and wondered what it all meant, I was still dazzled from time to time by her use of language and evocative imagery.
Very intriguing, but it's a book you have to work through.
September 19, 2013
This turned out to be a book that I could distantly appreciate -- it was completely unique and inventive -- but I just did not enjoy the read. Some of the details were delightfully weird. But most, for me, were weird in an off-putting way. (And I usually LOVE weird books!) It all felt pointless -- just a lot of strange concepts strung together to create a strange world. None of the narrative resonated with me.
I skimmed through the last bit just because I wanted to see it through to the end, and all I could feel was this great sense of relief that I didn't feel shackled to it anymore.
I skimmed through the last bit just because I wanted to see it through to the end, and all I could feel was this great sense of relief that I didn't feel shackled to it anymore.
September 10, 2013
Incomprehensible, yet familiar. While reading this book I was totally lost,yet knew exactly what was going on. Didn't want to keep reading, yet couldn't put it down. I can't tell you what to do with this book, you'll do it whether I suggest it or not. You probably already have.
November 6, 2013
Bizarre. As others have noted, the idea of this book may have been engaging, but somewhere along the way things went terribly wrong. I couldn't find a plot, and at some points it felt as if the author was simply stringing together colorful descriptions, phrases, characters and ideas she has been collecting for years, rather like a collage of interesting items from three different color families that don't quite work together to make a coherent image. The book was a very well-meaning gift, or I might not have held on until the end.
February 18, 2025
I get what Davis was doing. I’m just not sure I loved the neighborhood. A couple of the stories seemed better-centered as standalone stories. Victorian house with a brutalist addition? I did enjoy her ability (even at the sentence-level) to throw the read off-center. Her prose disorients and wobbles well; like the gentle tug of another object near, a blue planet’s gravity throwing a star off its spin.
December 16, 2014
I love this novel so much I wrote Kathryn Davis a fan letter. I read Duplex in two incredible sittings. I simply could not put the book down. I see it as prose poetry that explores what it is to be human and soulful and faced with the losses of existence, the enduring power of love through the eyes of a robot narrator, who somehow is humanized by existence, by writing, perhaps by art or the attempt to make it in the telling of this story.
This narrator has seen the story. She, as omniscient narrator (I am assured of this by the central consciousness “I” that tells the story and then later says: “Sometimes we befriended them [the humans with souls], sometimes we made things out of them like shoes or belts, often we ate them.”), writes the story as if she were each of the characters, at first with a decided distance that narrows and closes in on the stories of particularly Ms. Vicks, who teaches loves the sorcerer, lives alone and walks her dear dog, and she follows the paths through time of Eddie and Mary, who are in love. These are the characters with souls though poor, dear vulnerable Eddie has been seduced through his sensitivity to sell at great cost his soul to the sorcerer—that plot element is key to the arc, the conflict and the compassion of the story.
The magic of this writing lies in Kathryn Davis’s gifts. Here are lines I quote in astonished admiration:
“The moon is a rock, Mary thought, but you could see how it loved the place it came from in the way it wouldn’t let go of the tides.”
“Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond du Bois!” from, I assume after admittedly some research Vigny’s poem “Le Cor”, the final line where he bemoans the death of Roland: “God! But the horn calls sadly from the depth of the wood!”
“Seconds were always passing this way, thimbleful by thimbleful, as were the lives of living beings. This was why you kept getting smaller as you got older; it had nothing to do with bone loss.”
“Stars around the silver moon hide their silverness when she shines upon the earth, the girl said, quoting her favorite poet. Upon the black earth.” I believe the favorite poet is Sappho.
And when Eddie finally sees Mary again, “When she lifted her eyes to his he could see that they weren’t cloudy the way he’d expected them to be but alive and silver and lit by the fire of her spirit, which, like the sun, couldn’t be confronted directly but had to be filtered through the vitreous humor of her material self.”
Kathryn Davis is magic. Duplex is written with humor, with love, with fantasy that rides firmly on the back of reality. She took me back to my girlhood on a row-house-lined street and into my adulthood and gave me hope for old age.
This narrator has seen the story. She, as omniscient narrator (I am assured of this by the central consciousness “I” that tells the story and then later says: “Sometimes we befriended them [the humans with souls], sometimes we made things out of them like shoes or belts, often we ate them.”), writes the story as if she were each of the characters, at first with a decided distance that narrows and closes in on the stories of particularly Ms. Vicks, who teaches loves the sorcerer, lives alone and walks her dear dog, and she follows the paths through time of Eddie and Mary, who are in love. These are the characters with souls though poor, dear vulnerable Eddie has been seduced through his sensitivity to sell at great cost his soul to the sorcerer—that plot element is key to the arc, the conflict and the compassion of the story.
The magic of this writing lies in Kathryn Davis’s gifts. Here are lines I quote in astonished admiration:
“The moon is a rock, Mary thought, but you could see how it loved the place it came from in the way it wouldn’t let go of the tides.”
“Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond du Bois!” from, I assume after admittedly some research Vigny’s poem “Le Cor”, the final line where he bemoans the death of Roland: “God! But the horn calls sadly from the depth of the wood!”
“Seconds were always passing this way, thimbleful by thimbleful, as were the lives of living beings. This was why you kept getting smaller as you got older; it had nothing to do with bone loss.”
“Stars around the silver moon hide their silverness when she shines upon the earth, the girl said, quoting her favorite poet. Upon the black earth.” I believe the favorite poet is Sappho.
And when Eddie finally sees Mary again, “When she lifted her eyes to his he could see that they weren’t cloudy the way he’d expected them to be but alive and silver and lit by the fire of her spirit, which, like the sun, couldn’t be confronted directly but had to be filtered through the vitreous humor of her material self.”
Kathryn Davis is magic. Duplex is written with humor, with love, with fantasy that rides firmly on the back of reality. She took me back to my girlhood on a row-house-lined street and into my adulthood and gave me hope for old age.
November 11, 2016
dnf... this has been a year of hell for my reading!!
2 weeks ago had emergency ish surgery for partially detached retina.. so now im back to being unable to read...
eh..... i miss you all... and im falling sooo behind....
but i can say... for the most part.. what I read this year.. hasbeen REALLY good..
trying to get into 'the last one' for good reads choice.. but i wont make it in time I think....
soo depressing
2 weeks ago had emergency ish surgery for partially detached retina.. so now im back to being unable to read...
eh..... i miss you all... and im falling sooo behind....
but i can say... for the most part.. what I read this year.. hasbeen REALLY good..
trying to get into 'the last one' for good reads choice.. but i wont make it in time I think....
soo depressing
November 1, 2013
I won and received this book through Goodreads.
I hated it. I found it hard to read because it was so twisted and perverse. It was like the ramblings of a crazy person and not at all in an entertaining way.
I hated it. I found it hard to read because it was so twisted and perverse. It was like the ramblings of a crazy person and not at all in an entertaining way.
July 15, 2016
Imaginative to the point of incoherence. I kept having the feeling that I'd skipped a page, or maybe an entire chapter, but I hadn't. I could never pick a storyline out of all the fabulist narrative.
August 8, 2023
Enh. A lot of craft was put into the sentences (to the point, at times, of overwriting) and there are some lovely variations of fairy tales, including a 12 dancing princesses involving well-intentioned robots. But this book breaks a basic compact with the reader: most of the breadcrumbs the author scatters lead nowhere. It's exhausting to keep track of all the mysteries that pull you out of the narrative--why some children turn out "special" or the meaning of yellow bears or who the aquamen are--and none of that labor pays off. Threads simply drop. The only throughline turns out to be a somewhat sentimental belief in the lifelong persistence of one's childhood love. If you go in knowing this, and read it as a collection of short stories, not as a novel, you may find it less irritating then I did.
May 31, 2015
This is a very strange book, with many fantasy/alternate reality elements to it. I often felt baffled as to what was going on. But in the end I liked the book, and I found it thought-provoking. By the end I concluded that the fantastic elements were there to emphasize the importance of fantasy and wishes in our emotional lives. I would recommend it for those who like genre-bending literary fiction.
April 25, 2019
I'm going to have to think about that one for a while - RTC.
April 17, 2018
I have no idea what happened in this book, and I don't care because the journey and the words were so incredible that I enjoyed being carried along.
February 9, 2014
"The real and the unreal are laminated so tightly in “Duplex” you find yourself suddenly lost; you don’t know where or when this book takes place, you don’t know what this book is about at all. And that is how it takes you in. When I finished “Duplex” I had the unshakable feeling that I’d only read half of the book, and the other half was still in there and if I wanted to finish it, I’d need to read it again."
-Lynda Barry*
"Halfway through, I put the book down for two days. When I picked it up again, I had to start all over just to understand what the hell was going on. Still, I wouldn't take back one minute of reading. Sometimes really good company, the interesting, mind-expanding kind, leaves you scratching your head."
-Rosecrans Baldwin**
I'm not sure how certain books that create disorientation, confusion, or head scratching are touted so positively. I feel that it may have something to do with readers who do say they "got it" feeling smarter or superior to those who just don't get it at all. I got 80% of the way through and then decided it wasn't worth finishing. For those who finished it (and loved it), I'm ok with you being smarter than me. I don't want to be the kind of smart who finds robots fingering little girls inventive.
*Excerpt from The New York Times Sunday Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/boo...
** Excerpt from NPR Book Reviews:
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/03/2172795...
-Lynda Barry*
"Halfway through, I put the book down for two days. When I picked it up again, I had to start all over just to understand what the hell was going on. Still, I wouldn't take back one minute of reading. Sometimes really good company, the interesting, mind-expanding kind, leaves you scratching your head."
-Rosecrans Baldwin**
I'm not sure how certain books that create disorientation, confusion, or head scratching are touted so positively. I feel that it may have something to do with readers who do say they "got it" feeling smarter or superior to those who just don't get it at all. I got 80% of the way through and then decided it wasn't worth finishing. For those who finished it (and loved it), I'm ok with you being smarter than me. I don't want to be the kind of smart who finds robots fingering little girls inventive.
*Excerpt from The New York Times Sunday Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/boo...
** Excerpt from NPR Book Reviews:
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/03/2172795...
Read
October 2, 2013I can't begin to rate this book. It doesn't seem to belong in an orderly continuum of one to five stars. Imagine having a dream every night for two weeks, each linked with the same people, some real, some robots or sorcerers, giant grey hares, garbage scows in the air, and then you think you have woken up and a very unreliable narrator--Janet is explaining your dreams and telling you stories of the past, of the Great Division (death?), the Rain of Beads (?????), the Aquanauts (don't ask, but watch your children at the shore).
In its simplest terms the story seems to be about a boy Edie, who sold his soul to the sorcerer...Body Without Soul, so he could be a baseball star for the Rockets. The sorcerer now has a soul and is called Walter, and he now can love Mary--Edie's old girlfriend. But the robots and Miss Vicks--The ones who are paying attention...they get Edie and Mary back together...even if they don't remember each other. And that is the very best I can do to explain this book.
I can't rate it. Every time I left the book and would return, it was a struggle to remember what had come before. I felt like the girls listening to Janet's stories, trying to make sense of her account of their past and the reality of what they were now. And failing. This is either a one star or a five star, it is NOT anything in between.
In its simplest terms the story seems to be about a boy Edie, who sold his soul to the sorcerer...Body Without Soul, so he could be a baseball star for the Rockets. The sorcerer now has a soul and is called Walter, and he now can love Mary--Edie's old girlfriend. But the robots and Miss Vicks--The ones who are paying attention...they get Edie and Mary back together...even if they don't remember each other. And that is the very best I can do to explain this book.
I can't rate it. Every time I left the book and would return, it was a struggle to remember what had come before. I felt like the girls listening to Janet's stories, trying to make sense of her account of their past and the reality of what they were now. And failing. This is either a one star or a five star, it is NOT anything in between.
October 15, 2013
"Magical realism" as a genre descriptor seems to be reserved almost exclusively for Latin American novels; exactly why that is, I'm not sure, since Duplex fits squarely within the category of "naturalistic novels with fantastical/supernatural elements" and looks to be targeted at fans of that subgenre.
One way this short novel differs from the famous magical realist works like One Hundred Years of Solitude is that the plot is deeply buried in this work, to the point where it seems almost like a Ray Bradbury-ish collection of short stories instead of one continuous narrative. Hallucinatory elements like flights of robots, sorcerers, and airships coexist neatly with 1950-ish suburbs and sexually adventurous students, while the actual characters floating through these settings seem to only be connected by dream logic. On a sentence-by-sentence level Davis is occasionally impressive, but aside from the oddly febrile sexual escapades there's not much to hold the reader's attention. I realize that, in general, if you find yourself asking "What was the point of this?" after reading a book it probably means you missed something important, but I confess that this was one of the emptiest novels I've read in a while.
One way this short novel differs from the famous magical realist works like One Hundred Years of Solitude is that the plot is deeply buried in this work, to the point where it seems almost like a Ray Bradbury-ish collection of short stories instead of one continuous narrative. Hallucinatory elements like flights of robots, sorcerers, and airships coexist neatly with 1950-ish suburbs and sexually adventurous students, while the actual characters floating through these settings seem to only be connected by dream logic. On a sentence-by-sentence level Davis is occasionally impressive, but aside from the oddly febrile sexual escapades there's not much to hold the reader's attention. I realize that, in general, if you find yourself asking "What was the point of this?" after reading a book it probably means you missed something important, but I confess that this was one of the emptiest novels I've read in a while.
October 7, 2013
Packaged as short novel, but possibly more of a longform prose poem...
Either way, few books open with--or indeed, sustain--this much invention.
Davis sweeps the reader into a contemporary fable that fuses Calvino-esque sensibility/possibility with the wholly immanent and weirdly magical world of the half-hour sitcom. The lyrical result breaks rules: the POV slips spectrally from character to character, time and space shift from hypercompressed to expansive without warning. The most disruptive convention, though, is the way the narrative so tenuously clings to the throughlines of coming-of-age and long lost lovers.
My one line namecheck review:
David Lynch meets the Wonder Years. But played out over a lifetime.
This is not a plot driven story, but one of moods and colors--a painting in chapters. There are lovely moments and there are some boring moments, but the whole provides constant surprises and never slips into that bog of preciousness that sometimes suffocates boldly fabulist novels.
Either way, few books open with--or indeed, sustain--this much invention.
Davis sweeps the reader into a contemporary fable that fuses Calvino-esque sensibility/possibility with the wholly immanent and weirdly magical world of the half-hour sitcom. The lyrical result breaks rules: the POV slips spectrally from character to character, time and space shift from hypercompressed to expansive without warning. The most disruptive convention, though, is the way the narrative so tenuously clings to the throughlines of coming-of-age and long lost lovers.
My one line namecheck review:
David Lynch meets the Wonder Years. But played out over a lifetime.
This is not a plot driven story, but one of moods and colors--a painting in chapters. There are lovely moments and there are some boring moments, but the whole provides constant surprises and never slips into that bog of preciousness that sometimes suffocates boldly fabulist novels.
April 18, 2014
Duplex is a book that breaks faith with the reader. It looks like a novel, and feels like a novel, but in the end does not deliver on the basic expectations of the form. Its disjointed chapters don't work as short stories either, even though some of them were apparently published individually prior to their appearance here.
As a reader, my initial interest in understanding the book's intriguingly bizarre plot was steadily replaced by disappointment as it became clear that no such explanation was forthcoming, or perhaps even possible. There is an interesting kind of a dream logic at work here that loosely ties together the book's characters and themes, but it doesn't seem to add up to anything and rarely even bothers to try. If Duplex's sorcerers, robots, and befuddled humans are meant to be metaphorical somehow, the symbolism went over my head. I'd love to find out that I missed the point, but I don't think there is one.
As a reader, my initial interest in understanding the book's intriguingly bizarre plot was steadily replaced by disappointment as it became clear that no such explanation was forthcoming, or perhaps even possible. There is an interesting kind of a dream logic at work here that loosely ties together the book's characters and themes, but it doesn't seem to add up to anything and rarely even bothers to try. If Duplex's sorcerers, robots, and befuddled humans are meant to be metaphorical somehow, the symbolism went over my head. I'd love to find out that I missed the point, but I don't think there is one.
January 12, 2014
What in the world? Perhaps if I took some psychotropic drugs this book would have appealed to me. As it was, I found it bizarre, scattered and frankly her writing style is seriously overwritten for me. Like this winner on the first page ..."the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy..." Hunh? People, "melancholy" should never be used lightly and "scows" turn out to be spaceships with robots or something in them. Weird sexual violence is interspersed between unlikeable characters of every kind (centaur, robot, soulless person, sorcerer, you name it).
I could not make heads or tails of this book. Why it is a NYT Notable Book, I will never know. I seriously wish I had never opened it (because of course I can never resist finishing a book). Ugh.
I could not make heads or tails of this book. Why it is a NYT Notable Book, I will never know. I seriously wish I had never opened it (because of course I can never resist finishing a book). Ugh.
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