Duplex
A Novel
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
* A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year * A San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New Hampshire Public Radio, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *
* A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2013 *
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis's previous novels most recently The Thin Place blur the lines between magic and the mundane, and in this otherworldly novel those borders are eroded, with oddly mixed results. At first glance, Miss Vicks's grade-school class seems normal enough: there's delicate Mary, hyperactive Eddie, would-be writer Janice, and rich-kid Walter. But Walter is also a sorcerer, dealing in souls, who seduces Mary away from Eddie. And their suburban street, caught in the mysterious "Space Drift," seems to eschew the laws of physics. The new neighbors are robots; Miss Vicks walks her dog through a dreamscape; Mary's child, "Blue-Eyes," may be a monster; and the beach where Janice plays is home to "Aquanauts," strange sea creatures with eyes as "large and lustrous as plums." The book is less a novel than a dream, less populated by characters than by fantasy variations, less an experiment in genre than chaos, and Davis can't be faulted for her ambition, nor for prose that makes the sky seem like something you've never seen and makes robots' speech utterly quotidian. But where there is no gravity, there can be little pressure, and the result feels somewhat weightless. For all Davis's virtuosity, readers may have a hard time getting a grip on the story.
