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The Joy Divisions
The year is 1993, and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned home to work as a janitor in Allentown, Pennsylvania-the enigmatic nexus where goth kids, coffeeshop culture, and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis, the dying textiles industry, and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art, post-NAFTA labor battles, and burning factories, their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical, Scott Dimovitz's grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.
254 pages, Paperback
Published November 15, 2023
5 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Scott A Dimovitz
2 books9 followersScott Dimovitz received his Ph.D. in modern and postmodern literature from NYU, and he has taught writing and contemporary literature for many years at NYU and Regis University in Denver, CO, where he currently is an English professor. His short story, “Vestigial Tales,” was a recent finalist for the Gival Press Short Story Award, and he has twice won the Bennett Harris Humorous Writing Award. His monograph, *Angela Carter: Surrealist, Psychologist, Moral Pornographer*, is available from Routledge. He has written extensively on writers such as David Mitchell, Alison Bechdel, and Paul Auster, and he has published dozens of articles in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, C21: Journal of 21st Century Writings, and Contemporary Women's Writing. He now lives in Denver, CO among piles of books, guitars, and many half-graded student essays.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 18, 2023
This is one of those books that holds it’s cards close to it’s chest, from the blurb I had no real idea of what to expect and whilst reading the book I still had no idea where I was being taken…I just had that sense of impending doom compelling me along. A large amount of this book explores Faith in it’s many forms and that’s what I had at the beginning, a Faith that I had in my hands an incredible piece of writing…turns out that it was well placed cos this was an incredible reading experience.
The first thing of note is the feeling of nostalgia, the era this is set in is the 90’s a time where my taste in music moved away from what my parents listened to, Dimovitz mentions many cool bands from my youth that I hadn’t listened to in ages, Alexa has been working overtime playing these old tunes for me. Movies get a mention too, I rewatched Reservoir Dogs for the first time in ages thanks to Dimovitz. A lot of the political and Labour battles was before my time, I’d never heard of NAFTA until now…the stand out thing I took from what I learnt here is that not much has changed all these years later. Dimovitz has also created one of the most annoying characters ever, cult leader Tom Griffon feels like an argument with a dumb troll on twitter, perfectly crafted to antagonise the reader.
Dimovitz blends literature and lecture to both entertain and inform the reader and when two of the most interesting characters (Joanie and Philos) started to talk I felt myself sit up straighter in anticipation, so many topics were discussed and all written in a way that was engaging and didn’t whoosh over my head. As for that sense of impending doom I had, I wasn’t wrong, it happened and left me speechless, the descriptions of the disaster were top notch. At times the writing was rather poetic, you can sense a bit of David Foster Wallace as inspiration.
Hugely entertaining and one of those books that has the potential to inspire. Highly recommended.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...
The first thing of note is the feeling of nostalgia, the era this is set in is the 90’s a time where my taste in music moved away from what my parents listened to, Dimovitz mentions many cool bands from my youth that I hadn’t listened to in ages, Alexa has been working overtime playing these old tunes for me. Movies get a mention too, I rewatched Reservoir Dogs for the first time in ages thanks to Dimovitz. A lot of the political and Labour battles was before my time, I’d never heard of NAFTA until now…the stand out thing I took from what I learnt here is that not much has changed all these years later. Dimovitz has also created one of the most annoying characters ever, cult leader Tom Griffon feels like an argument with a dumb troll on twitter, perfectly crafted to antagonise the reader.
Dimovitz blends literature and lecture to both entertain and inform the reader and when two of the most interesting characters (Joanie and Philos) started to talk I felt myself sit up straighter in anticipation, so many topics were discussed and all written in a way that was engaging and didn’t whoosh over my head. As for that sense of impending doom I had, I wasn’t wrong, it happened and left me speechless, the descriptions of the disaster were top notch. At times the writing was rather poetic, you can sense a bit of David Foster Wallace as inspiration.
Hugely entertaining and one of those books that has the potential to inspire. Highly recommended.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...
August 27, 2023
Joy Divisions is a kaleidoscopic look into the shifting Pennsylvanian working class world of the early 1990s. This isn’t a valediction forbidding mourning—it is one that demands it. Told through the eyes of various lost souls navigating an evaporating and changing world, Joy Divisions tears everything apart so that it can be put back together again.
January 10, 2024
I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
There's a lot going on in The Joy Divisions and it makes for a wonderful read. Part coming-of-age, part theology, part philosophy, this is a book you don't want to miss!
Read the full review on my blog!
There's a lot going on in The Joy Divisions and it makes for a wonderful read. Part coming-of-age, part theology, part philosophy, this is a book you don't want to miss!
Read the full review on my blog!
January 19, 2024
Scott Dimovitz’s *The Joy Divisions* is a wonderfully engaging combination of opposites: detailed and summary, colloquial and intellectual, believable and unbelievable. Its characters range from the fantastic to the everyday. It conveys the real history of a building and an alternative history of the same. It ends on a hopeful note—amid an opera dramatizing cosmic destruction. References to great art and to serious scholarship combine with mention of television shows and movies, punk and post-punk bands, and more; punk, popular, and academic—and the esoteric—all merge. These references define settings, suggest mindsets, and perpetually surprise the reader with unlikely combinations (a coffee shop called “Origen’s Hava Java,” murals depicting “Brobdingnagian genitalia”). The book is serious and whimsical. Describing the cataclysmic collapse of a department store, the narrator says, “[…] the building’s structure started to buckle and groan like some harpooned leviathan wailing for its absent mother.” Intentionally or not, the simile scrambles the roles of ship and whale at the conclusion of *Moby Dick* to comic effect despite the circumstances. In like manner, the book as a whole is casually, off-handedly imaginative; it is full of odd yet effective analogies. Fighting terrorists is compared to Mickey Mouse “fighting the brooms in Fantasia.”
*The Joy Divisions* is stylistically diverse, formally playful. It passes from one style to another, from one mind to another, through voice after voice, and through journalistic reportage. It includes realistic scenes, carefully delineated social settings; a song satirizing postmodernists; a murmurous, muttering, Joycean trek across Allentown; a woman’s agonized, conscience-wracked interior monologue; thumbnail sketches of characters’ backgrounds; extended personal histories; an excerpt from a fictitious economics journal the name of which is the same as the name of a real journal minus the word “the;” the same play with a real and a fictitious newspaper. (At one point, a real excerpt from a real newspaper immediately precedes a made-up press release from a paper with the same name as the real one minus the “the.”) The book includes expository stretches of real history couched in natural-sounding voices, in believable speaking voices that go on and on believably to unbelievable lengths and into unbelievable detail.
*The Joy Divisions* abounds with fabulous—and sometimes fabular—characters: a stunning transvestite singer whose name is patently a joke; a photographer who endows carrion with the stature of landscape; a model who becomes increasingly popular the more extreme her rejection of conventional beauty; a male bigot who makes doll clothes. Less outré people appear: a shop steward; his daughter; a counselor to pregnant women. Two important characters are unbelievably dual. One of these is a marketer-turned-guru-turned-marketer-again, a man obsessed with the idea of “the coming apocalypse,” who first appears with a “half-Jesus” hairdo, head long-haired on one side, clean-shaven on the other. The other deeply dual, believable / unbelievable character is an ethnically Greek, half-Jewish wanderer who pursues two projects, one, travel writing, one, an unreligious act of atonement, a mission to contact and to disabuse the victims of a deception. Then there is the thoughtful, critical main character, Ed Pullman, who is subtly dual himself, who is often the mindful and quietly oppositional sounding board for other peoples’ ideas. The once-suicidal, black-clad, goth-styled “specter” Ed longs for “a gentler life” than that afforded by his working-class environs. In the book’s incongruous final section set ten years after the book’s main events, Ed winds up the loose end that was himself by stating summarily that he went back to college and became a high-school history teacher.
Ed twice sees or senses nothingness: a “cold impersonal immutable chaos,” an eternal, ever-present “center of infinite nothingness.” The first time, after a blizzard, remembering Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” he senses “a flatline of non-existence.” The second time, after the climactic subsidence of the department store, in book’s most intense passages, Ed sees the horizon formerly blocked by the building: “[…] he saw nothing now but a flat curvilinear limitless horizon that spoke of” an utter nothingness that “was always there and always would be.” After studying a reproduction of Salvadore Dalí’s 1950 version of *The Madonna of Port Lligat,* Ed leans back and shuts his eyes; remembering the painting, “his mind saw nothing but the horizon line through a transparent Messiah.” These references to straight lines may pertain—as the merest, the haziest suggestions of meaning—to a configuration that appears throughout the book: “two parallel lines hovering across the eternity symbol.”
At a party atop the doomed department-store building, immediately before the catastrophe, Ed, considering the choice of music playing, thinks lightly, “Everything was text, right?” Dimovitz all but says, “Right, and don’t you forget it.” Ed’s observations and the narrator’s descriptions make the disaster believable. But the author manipulates events to patently symbolic ends. An overhead decoration falls on a shop steward, a passionate proponent of workers’ rights, crushing his legs, leading immediately to his death: a manner of death exactly like that of a worker mentioned previously, one Hiram Sell, killed in a boiler explosion in 1888. The shop steward said earlier, “I’ve always thought of that story about Hiram Sell […] as a perfect metaphor for the history of labor in this country.” Dimovitz suggests three interpretations of the building’s fall as symbolic. (It may symbolize the crushing diminishment of workers’ rights and benefits under their “new corporate overlords.” The building, an accretion of additions “patch-quilted over the century to accommodate the growth of the American dream,” may represent the unsustainability of that dream, consumerism overtaxing nature. And, at the book’s very end, Ed refers to Wagner’s *Ring Cycle* largely for the opportunity it affords to invoke George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the *Cycle* “as an allegory for the final collapse of the internal contractions of capitalism,” a judgment that, by virtue of its prominent inclusion, must extend to the building’s subsidence as well.)
Further reminders that the book is a text—a fabrication, something other than a presentation of actual events—are the characters’ names: Donner, Tod (German for “death”), Philos King. Some of the names are ironic (“Richie” is far from rich), some comic (Sheehy, Barbello). Some names translate evocatively (“art cellar,” “bright faith”). Ed Pullman pulls the narrative along more than he is pulled like a transported train car. (Someone calls the Pullman Strike of 1894 Ed’s “namesake.”)
*The Joy Divisions* rewards reading. Read it for its fleeting embraces of bodies of thought, for its naturally-spoken, non-academic engagement with ideas (identity, memory, causality, and more), for its references to specialists in philosophy, theology, psychology, and more. Read it for its interest in duality as a concept and in particular instances of duality. Read it for the sense that the book is, itself, dual, that it consists of two books put together, the first dense with realistic detail, the second much more summary—lacking in grounding details but rich in vivid dialog and running to interesting but overtly informational expositions. Both phases of the book, the detailed first and the summary second, end with public gatherings; both gatherings end in disaster, one relatively minor, one fantastically immense. Read this book for the sake of Ed’s transformation. Read *The Joy Divisions* for its great store of learning lightly borne, for its living sense of the year 1993 (in particular), and for its engagement with issues and ideas still pertinent. - Carla Bradsher-Fredrick, author of *Hands and Straight Lines*
*The Joy Divisions* is stylistically diverse, formally playful. It passes from one style to another, from one mind to another, through voice after voice, and through journalistic reportage. It includes realistic scenes, carefully delineated social settings; a song satirizing postmodernists; a murmurous, muttering, Joycean trek across Allentown; a woman’s agonized, conscience-wracked interior monologue; thumbnail sketches of characters’ backgrounds; extended personal histories; an excerpt from a fictitious economics journal the name of which is the same as the name of a real journal minus the word “the;” the same play with a real and a fictitious newspaper. (At one point, a real excerpt from a real newspaper immediately precedes a made-up press release from a paper with the same name as the real one minus the “the.”) The book includes expository stretches of real history couched in natural-sounding voices, in believable speaking voices that go on and on believably to unbelievable lengths and into unbelievable detail.
*The Joy Divisions* abounds with fabulous—and sometimes fabular—characters: a stunning transvestite singer whose name is patently a joke; a photographer who endows carrion with the stature of landscape; a model who becomes increasingly popular the more extreme her rejection of conventional beauty; a male bigot who makes doll clothes. Less outré people appear: a shop steward; his daughter; a counselor to pregnant women. Two important characters are unbelievably dual. One of these is a marketer-turned-guru-turned-marketer-again, a man obsessed with the idea of “the coming apocalypse,” who first appears with a “half-Jesus” hairdo, head long-haired on one side, clean-shaven on the other. The other deeply dual, believable / unbelievable character is an ethnically Greek, half-Jewish wanderer who pursues two projects, one, travel writing, one, an unreligious act of atonement, a mission to contact and to disabuse the victims of a deception. Then there is the thoughtful, critical main character, Ed Pullman, who is subtly dual himself, who is often the mindful and quietly oppositional sounding board for other peoples’ ideas. The once-suicidal, black-clad, goth-styled “specter” Ed longs for “a gentler life” than that afforded by his working-class environs. In the book’s incongruous final section set ten years after the book’s main events, Ed winds up the loose end that was himself by stating summarily that he went back to college and became a high-school history teacher.
Ed twice sees or senses nothingness: a “cold impersonal immutable chaos,” an eternal, ever-present “center of infinite nothingness.” The first time, after a blizzard, remembering Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” he senses “a flatline of non-existence.” The second time, after the climactic subsidence of the department store, in book’s most intense passages, Ed sees the horizon formerly blocked by the building: “[…] he saw nothing now but a flat curvilinear limitless horizon that spoke of” an utter nothingness that “was always there and always would be.” After studying a reproduction of Salvadore Dalí’s 1950 version of *The Madonna of Port Lligat,* Ed leans back and shuts his eyes; remembering the painting, “his mind saw nothing but the horizon line through a transparent Messiah.” These references to straight lines may pertain—as the merest, the haziest suggestions of meaning—to a configuration that appears throughout the book: “two parallel lines hovering across the eternity symbol.”
At a party atop the doomed department-store building, immediately before the catastrophe, Ed, considering the choice of music playing, thinks lightly, “Everything was text, right?” Dimovitz all but says, “Right, and don’t you forget it.” Ed’s observations and the narrator’s descriptions make the disaster believable. But the author manipulates events to patently symbolic ends. An overhead decoration falls on a shop steward, a passionate proponent of workers’ rights, crushing his legs, leading immediately to his death: a manner of death exactly like that of a worker mentioned previously, one Hiram Sell, killed in a boiler explosion in 1888. The shop steward said earlier, “I’ve always thought of that story about Hiram Sell […] as a perfect metaphor for the history of labor in this country.” Dimovitz suggests three interpretations of the building’s fall as symbolic. (It may symbolize the crushing diminishment of workers’ rights and benefits under their “new corporate overlords.” The building, an accretion of additions “patch-quilted over the century to accommodate the growth of the American dream,” may represent the unsustainability of that dream, consumerism overtaxing nature. And, at the book’s very end, Ed refers to Wagner’s *Ring Cycle* largely for the opportunity it affords to invoke George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the *Cycle* “as an allegory for the final collapse of the internal contractions of capitalism,” a judgment that, by virtue of its prominent inclusion, must extend to the building’s subsidence as well.)
Further reminders that the book is a text—a fabrication, something other than a presentation of actual events—are the characters’ names: Donner, Tod (German for “death”), Philos King. Some of the names are ironic (“Richie” is far from rich), some comic (Sheehy, Barbello). Some names translate evocatively (“art cellar,” “bright faith”). Ed Pullman pulls the narrative along more than he is pulled like a transported train car. (Someone calls the Pullman Strike of 1894 Ed’s “namesake.”)
*The Joy Divisions* rewards reading. Read it for its fleeting embraces of bodies of thought, for its naturally-spoken, non-academic engagement with ideas (identity, memory, causality, and more), for its references to specialists in philosophy, theology, psychology, and more. Read it for its interest in duality as a concept and in particular instances of duality. Read it for the sense that the book is, itself, dual, that it consists of two books put together, the first dense with realistic detail, the second much more summary—lacking in grounding details but rich in vivid dialog and running to interesting but overtly informational expositions. Both phases of the book, the detailed first and the summary second, end with public gatherings; both gatherings end in disaster, one relatively minor, one fantastically immense. Read this book for the sake of Ed’s transformation. Read *The Joy Divisions* for its great store of learning lightly borne, for its living sense of the year 1993 (in particular), and for its engagement with issues and ideas still pertinent. - Carla Bradsher-Fredrick, author of *Hands and Straight Lines*
June 12, 2024
An intense portrayal of personal evolution in contemporary life, Scott Dimovitz’s The Joy Divisions, offers an immersive literary jaunt back to a time and place where drugs, angst, history, art, music, literature, blue collar woes, and consciousness cult idealism, intersect through surprising events, in 1990’s Allentown, Pennsylvania, creatively explored through the eyes, minds, and interactions of its varied characters.
This insightful historical narrative is a work replete with the many facets of life, which focuses on the many aspects of the human condition. In fact, this book brings so much to the table in terms of demonstrating an intellectual expertise in a variety of cultural elements as well as history prevalent during the 1990s. Furthermore, this narrative maintains the attention with smoothly flowing narrative, vivid detailing and seamless storytelling, including an additional bent for the humorous at times. The story instantly draws you in with gritty, complex characters and situations, which dutifully pique the curiosity as to the story’s overall path. Particularly interesting is Ed Pullman the central figure. Ed is an art school dropout, who returns to his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania, circa 1990s, he is coping with a great deal of angst; he lost his girlfriend, his mother, and his drive for life which in turn causes his overall faith in life to steadily wane. Ed, often caught up in his own emotions and thoughts, wants to connect with others but struggles.
Moreover, as other characters come into focus within the story, each helms their unique back story and cultural perspective, which leads to many intellectually posed, multifaceted moments of analysis and insight, including philosophy, art, consciousness, religion, and alternative music references, as well as many literary references.
Also, author Dimovitz does very well in illustrating the perspective of the working-class culture native to the locale of Allentown Pennsylvania in the 1990’s with brief historical accounts drawing out the economic and political template which affected the characters’ lives.
Overall, The Joy Divisions by author Scott Dimovitz, made for an intellectually stimulating read. I enjoyed the edifying nature of the story which kept me enmeshed and immersed in a world I knew nothing about but wanted to know more of. Additionally, what I found to be riveting about this book was the sharply detailed descriptions of the setting steeped in colorful specifics. It was as though I was a denizen walking down the street. As well, I enjoyed the unique characterizations; The cult leader with a plan to save the world, the beautiful transvestite and the model who bucked the standard of beauty. Altogether this was a great read that I would recommend to those seeking a uniquely posed historical fiction read that truly stimulates the intellect.
This insightful historical narrative is a work replete with the many facets of life, which focuses on the many aspects of the human condition. In fact, this book brings so much to the table in terms of demonstrating an intellectual expertise in a variety of cultural elements as well as history prevalent during the 1990s. Furthermore, this narrative maintains the attention with smoothly flowing narrative, vivid detailing and seamless storytelling, including an additional bent for the humorous at times. The story instantly draws you in with gritty, complex characters and situations, which dutifully pique the curiosity as to the story’s overall path. Particularly interesting is Ed Pullman the central figure. Ed is an art school dropout, who returns to his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania, circa 1990s, he is coping with a great deal of angst; he lost his girlfriend, his mother, and his drive for life which in turn causes his overall faith in life to steadily wane. Ed, often caught up in his own emotions and thoughts, wants to connect with others but struggles.
Moreover, as other characters come into focus within the story, each helms their unique back story and cultural perspective, which leads to many intellectually posed, multifaceted moments of analysis and insight, including philosophy, art, consciousness, religion, and alternative music references, as well as many literary references.
Also, author Dimovitz does very well in illustrating the perspective of the working-class culture native to the locale of Allentown Pennsylvania in the 1990’s with brief historical accounts drawing out the economic and political template which affected the characters’ lives.
Overall, The Joy Divisions by author Scott Dimovitz, made for an intellectually stimulating read. I enjoyed the edifying nature of the story which kept me enmeshed and immersed in a world I knew nothing about but wanted to know more of. Additionally, what I found to be riveting about this book was the sharply detailed descriptions of the setting steeped in colorful specifics. It was as though I was a denizen walking down the street. As well, I enjoyed the unique characterizations; The cult leader with a plan to save the world, the beautiful transvestite and the model who bucked the standard of beauty. Altogether this was a great read that I would recommend to those seeking a uniquely posed historical fiction read that truly stimulates the intellect.
November 17, 2024
A kaleidoscope of early '90s America; a love letter to Allentown, PA (and Rust Belt middle America more broadly); a portrait of characters grappling with big political, theological, and philosophical questions while mostly only finding (or shrugging) their way toward cataclysmic cul-de-sacs. And whew, do the cataclysms ever land.
I wanted to spend more time with a lot of the cast than the novel gave them. While it was nice to read fiction without the longueurs of comparable work by e.g. Franzen or Wallace, I missed the space a doorstop novel allows to flesh out its supporting cast. A generous share of the book instead goes toward conveying place and past, both of which I enjoyed.
The protagonist, Ed, is one of the novel's less interesting characters (albeit the one most like me) -- an observer, a participant in things others initiate, with tendencies toward passivity and self-abnegation if not self-annihilation. The characters who've already found something to live for are much more engaging reads. Philos's introductory chapter is richly and intriguingly written, with some of the book's most memorable prose, and the revelation toward the end of what he's up to was thoroughly satisfying. Ester's first-person confessional chapter was the highlight of the book. I wish I'd had the chance to see how they, not just Ed, interpreted the story's climactic disaster.
And of course there's Tod, the charismatic prophet of unity and opposites reconciled, who repeatedly brings about apocalyptic results in the name of avoiding apocalypse. He's such a vividly drawn cautionary tale -- his story alone would be well worth the read, even if I hadn't enjoyed so much else about Joy Divisions.
The chapter-by-chapter switching between different styles and POVs will probably leave most readers enjoying some sections more than others. The industrial history of Allentown is both interesting and key to the story, but the longest excursus into it came at an odd point in the novel. I don't expect literary fiction to be paced like a potboiler, but spending a lot of time away from the characters at that particular juncture between cataclysms sapped some energy from this reader.
Overall an enjoyable, thought-provoking evocation of the recent past, with some incredibly memorable moments and characters. Warmly recommended.
I wanted to spend more time with a lot of the cast than the novel gave them. While it was nice to read fiction without the longueurs of comparable work by e.g. Franzen or Wallace, I missed the space a doorstop novel allows to flesh out its supporting cast. A generous share of the book instead goes toward conveying place and past, both of which I enjoyed.
The protagonist, Ed, is one of the novel's less interesting characters (albeit the one most like me) -- an observer, a participant in things others initiate, with tendencies toward passivity and self-abnegation if not self-annihilation. The characters who've already found something to live for are much more engaging reads. Philos's introductory chapter is richly and intriguingly written, with some of the book's most memorable prose, and the revelation toward the end of what he's up to was thoroughly satisfying. Ester's first-person confessional chapter was the highlight of the book. I wish I'd had the chance to see how they, not just Ed, interpreted the story's climactic disaster.
And of course there's Tod, the charismatic prophet of unity and opposites reconciled, who repeatedly brings about apocalyptic results in the name of avoiding apocalypse. He's such a vividly drawn cautionary tale -- his story alone would be well worth the read, even if I hadn't enjoyed so much else about Joy Divisions.
The chapter-by-chapter switching between different styles and POVs will probably leave most readers enjoying some sections more than others. The industrial history of Allentown is both interesting and key to the story, but the longest excursus into it came at an odd point in the novel. I don't expect literary fiction to be paced like a potboiler, but spending a lot of time away from the characters at that particular juncture between cataclysms sapped some energy from this reader.
Overall an enjoyable, thought-provoking evocation of the recent past, with some incredibly memorable moments and characters. Warmly recommended.
September 13, 2024
Dimovitz makes his debut with this taut, immersive exploration of identity and loss set against the decaying backdrop of 1990s Philadelphia. The story follows Ed Pullman, a failed artist grappling with alienation and his mother’s death, as he seeks meaning in a world unraveling around him. As Ed navigates this collapsing world, his relationships with his cousin Ester deepen his search for meaning in a landscape fraught with disillusionment.
Set in a vividly depicted, deteriorating Philadelphia, Dimovitz’s sharp prose captures the fractured identities of his characters, grounding personal crises in a crumbling social order. Ed remains at the center of the narrative. His introspection and disillusionment resonate with readers as he navigates a transitional phase, breaking free from societal expectations and seeking an authentic existence. The pseudo-messianic Tod Griffon, leader of the cult-like Kinfolk, straddles the line between visionary and manipulator, adding a darker layer to the novel. His cryptic philosophies blur the line between enlightenment and control, casting an ominous shadow over the group. Lavinia’s provocative art and her fraught relationships with both Ed and Tod reveal power dynamics within the Kinfolk, with her defiance and moments of submission heightening the tension.
Dimovitz masterfully weaves existential questions throughout, inviting readers to confront beliefs, identity, and autonomy amid societal collapse. Echoing the existential inquiries of Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger,’ the novel extends beyond these classics by urging readers to critically reassess the foundations of their own reality.
A bold, thought-provoking debut that lingers long after its final page.
Set in a vividly depicted, deteriorating Philadelphia, Dimovitz’s sharp prose captures the fractured identities of his characters, grounding personal crises in a crumbling social order. Ed remains at the center of the narrative. His introspection and disillusionment resonate with readers as he navigates a transitional phase, breaking free from societal expectations and seeking an authentic existence. The pseudo-messianic Tod Griffon, leader of the cult-like Kinfolk, straddles the line between visionary and manipulator, adding a darker layer to the novel. His cryptic philosophies blur the line between enlightenment and control, casting an ominous shadow over the group. Lavinia’s provocative art and her fraught relationships with both Ed and Tod reveal power dynamics within the Kinfolk, with her defiance and moments of submission heightening the tension.
Dimovitz masterfully weaves existential questions throughout, inviting readers to confront beliefs, identity, and autonomy amid societal collapse. Echoing the existential inquiries of Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger,’ the novel extends beyond these classics by urging readers to critically reassess the foundations of their own reality.
A bold, thought-provoking debut that lingers long after its final page.
September 13, 2024
Dimovitz delivers a stark portrayal of a generation grappling with economic decay and cultural upheaval in his impressive debut novel. Set in 1993, the novel follows Ed Pullman, a disillusioned art student who returns to his crumbling hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Amidst the city's vanishing jobs and decaying factories, Ed, alongside his cousin Ester, falls under the sway of the enigmatic cult leader Tod Griffon. As their town edges toward disaster, Ed and Ester must struggle to find their place in a shifting, desolate world.
Dimovitz brings the city to life with striking realism, where the subcultures of goth kids, drag queens, and café philosophers clash with the darker undercurrents of neo-Nazis and a fading textile industry. Ed’s complex relationship with Ester, simultaneously comforting and challenging, adds a layer of emotional depth to the novel, reflecting the messy, often fraught nature of family ties in difficult times.
Dimovitz’s prose is precise and emotionally charged, creating an atmosphere thick with tension and urgency. His depiction of a city on the brink underscores the novels’ larger themes of identity, resilience, and survival, while the focus on art as resistance illustrates creativity as a lifeline amidst societal disintegration. Both a powerful reflection of a bygone era and a searing commentary on the quest for purpose in a world of shifting ground, the novel makes for a memorable read.
Amidst the city's vanishing jobs and decaying factories, Ed, alongside his cousin Ester, falls under the sway of the enigmatic cult leader Tod Griffon. As their town edges toward disaster, Ed and Ester must struggle to find their place in a shifting, desolate world.
Dimovitz brings the city to life with striking realism, where the subcultures of goth kids, drag queens, and café philosophers clash with the darker undercurrents of neo-Nazis and a fading textile industry. Ed’s complex relationship with Ester, simultaneously comforting and challenging, adds a layer of emotional depth to the novel, reflecting the messy, often fraught nature of family ties in difficult times.
Dimovitz’s prose is precise and emotionally charged, creating an atmosphere thick with tension and urgency. His depiction of a city on the brink underscores the novels’ larger themes of identity, resilience, and survival, while the focus on art as resistance illustrates creativity as a lifeline amidst societal disintegration. Both a powerful reflection of a bygone era and a searing commentary on the quest for purpose in a world of shifting ground, the novel makes for a memorable read.
December 12, 2023
Full disclosure-- I blurbed this book, and I couldn't manage to encapsulate all of its brilliance in just one sentence, so I created two.
The Joy Divisions by Scott Dimovitz is a Katamari ball dropped in early 90s working class Pennsylvania, absorbing everything from Philly’s goth-punk scene to Allentown’s silk factory union struggle, and then rolling through the pop culture detritus of America—Pink Floyd and Hegel and Faulkner and NAFTA and Dionysus and the Waco siege—to create a glittering constellation that smolders with humanity’s biggest questions: Who are we? Can we escape the past? What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
Combining the vision of Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace with his own wry voice, The Joy Divisions by Scott Dimovitz is a smart, funny, maximalist romp through 90s working class Pennsylvania that turns a critical eye not only on the historical and cultural forces that dismantled America’s industrial identity but also on the dangerous naivete of religious groupthink, all while delving into the existential questions undergirding human existence.
The Joy Divisions by Scott Dimovitz is a Katamari ball dropped in early 90s working class Pennsylvania, absorbing everything from Philly’s goth-punk scene to Allentown’s silk factory union struggle, and then rolling through the pop culture detritus of America—Pink Floyd and Hegel and Faulkner and NAFTA and Dionysus and the Waco siege—to create a glittering constellation that smolders with humanity’s biggest questions: Who are we? Can we escape the past? What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
Combining the vision of Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace with his own wry voice, The Joy Divisions by Scott Dimovitz is a smart, funny, maximalist romp through 90s working class Pennsylvania that turns a critical eye not only on the historical and cultural forces that dismantled America’s industrial identity but also on the dangerous naivete of religious groupthink, all while delving into the existential questions undergirding human existence.
November 15, 2023
I have never read a book like this one. Philosophical and hilarious, insightful and ambitious, The Joy Divisions took me to a world I didn’t know I was missing: a 1990’s rust-belt subculture lush with artists and drag queens, unions and cults, quiet conversations and epic “happenings.” In my favorite section I found myself deeply (and surprisingly) identifying with Ester, whose moving, poetic stream of consciousness still haunts me. Most of all, this novel made me rethink how we got here. Shining a critical light on the easy 1990’s ethos of friction-free sameness, this book elegantly weaves a narrative of the forces that made the world we know today, from the decimation of the American working class to the rise of fascism. There truly is joy in divisions, and The Joy Divisions can help us rethink the choices we make – as individuals and nations – and the consequences they have. And it will make you gasp, shout, think, and laugh aloud all the way through.
November 11, 2023
What a romp! Scott Dimovitz’s prose dances, skitters, plunges, and bounce-trips across the page, luring you close only to slap you upside the head, paving an roadway of meaning laced with land-mines, building a corporation of metaphor only to collapse it into a catastrophic sinkhole. This is a first-rate story of a ‘90s Mr. Lonelyhearts and a cast of goth-punkers, capitalists, unionists, and cultists that you can’t help but find both alarming and lovable. Where did contemporary America come from and where is it headed? It’s all found here, in the unlikely petri dish of Allentown during the ugly after-birth of NAFTA, and in the alternatively philosophical and cinematic prose of Scott Dimovitz.
December 15, 2023
This is a book about Allentown, Pa. It also has a cast of interesting characters, but the character at the heart of the book is really Allentown. It has a wonderfully vivid sense of place. The author clearly has a love-hate relationship with the city, and this is something of a love letter to a town in the same skewed way as the Weakerthans' song "One Great City" by or Richard Linklater's "Slacker."
It starts somewhat like "Slacker," with a series of vignettes threaded together with a couple of main characters. The first couple of chapters didn't grab me, so I suggest sticking with it if you don't immediately love it.
By about page 120, I was deeply invested in the characters and the propulsive buildup to the defining climax of the book (of which I am not saying anything else for fear of spoiling any surprises).
And by the end, I really loved the book and I wanted to start it all over again. Dimovitz really rounds out some story arcs and fleshes out characters with ideas and events that I really didn't see coming. I also didn't expect the book to be such a thoughtful treatise on globalization and the modern economy.
It starts somewhat like "Slacker," with a series of vignettes threaded together with a couple of main characters. The first couple of chapters didn't grab me, so I suggest sticking with it if you don't immediately love it.
By about page 120, I was deeply invested in the characters and the propulsive buildup to the defining climax of the book (of which I am not saying anything else for fear of spoiling any surprises).
And by the end, I really loved the book and I wanted to start it all over again. Dimovitz really rounds out some story arcs and fleshes out characters with ideas and events that I really didn't see coming. I also didn't expect the book to be such a thoughtful treatise on globalization and the modern economy.
May 22, 2024
In the sprawl of this novel comes a great many wonderful things: a lament for the world we live in, a celebration of community, a dive into the depths of our world’s history, a laugh, a tearful goodbye, and so, so many references to beloved literary classics. All of this and more comes together to emulate the beauty, the chaos, and the horror of life in a new millennium, one with far fewer opportunities for hope and change than ever before. To capture so many distinctly different feelings and experiences while remaining so compelling and artful is a true accomplishment.
December 11, 2023
A truly marvelous novel! Riveting setting descriptions, fascinating characters, and an epic ending you will NEVER see coming. Captures several different sub cultures with the accuracy of a documentarian and the style of a neo Joyce! This book is an absolute must-read.
January 19, 2024
My rare 5-star. A glorious anti-capitalism Gen X novel that captures the pre-millennium despair (and hope?) of the 90's. Like, if Joyce grew up in Appalachia and had a party with Bernie Sanders and a history professor, this is the book that would come out of it. Oooohhh and there are pictures!
January 24, 2024
Could not have a feeling for the city as I live in Australia.. Sorry, Scott Dimovitz I should have ventured into more information.
independent review NetGalley / Tailwinds Press
independent review NetGalley / Tailwinds Press
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