Dirt
A Novel
-
-
3.3 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1985, and twenty-two-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded old house surrounded by a walnut orchard in a suburb of Sacramento. He doesn't know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother, losing her memory, has been shipped off to a nursing home. Galen and his mother survive on the family's trust fund—old money that his aunt, Helen, and seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands on.
Galen, a New Age believer who considers himself an old soul, yearns for transformation: to free himself from the corporeal, to be as weightless as air, to walk on water. But he's powerless to stop the manic binges that overtake him, leading him to fixate on forbidden desires. A prisoner of his body, he is obsessed with thoughts of the boldly flirtatious Jennifer and dreams of shedding himself of the clinging mother whose fears and needs weigh him down.
When the family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, near South Lake Tahoe, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain the transcendence he craves.
An exhilarating portrayal of a legacy of violence and madness, Dirt is an entirely feverish read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's a kind of sadistic integrity to this story of putrefying family life and mental breakdown in 1980s Northern California, Vann's follow-up to last year's Caribou Island. Galen, a relentlessly unpleasant 22-year-old loser, lives at home with his mother on a family estate slowly being smothered by the encroaching suburbs. They spend identical days after days quietly hating each other and regularly visiting a dementia-afflicted grandmother; sometimes Galen's aunt and 17-year-old cousin come along from sheer force of habit. His aunt shares his hatred for his mother's false cheer (and resents her for being set to inherit all the family money), while his cousin cruelly amuses herself at Galen's poorly hidden sexual interest in her. Galen's adolescent spirituality and odd behaviors are grating, but fairly benign until the toxic stew of pentup anger and dysfunction threatens the family's queasy equilibrium, pushing him to a breaking point. The last third or more of the book comprise his slowly worsening descent into madness (or evil). Vann's evocation in readers of great annoyance followed by dawning horror at his main character is smartly disorienting, allowing him to plumb sickening depths by believable degrees.
