Title: Wolf in White Van
Author: John Darnielle
Published: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 180,290
Text Number: 530
Read Because: recommended by and borrowed from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
century_eyes
Review: As a teenager, Sean was hospitalized and left profoundly disfigured; to cope, he absorbed himself in the creation of a post-apocalyptic text-based game, Trace Italian. Wolf in White Van is a novel about internal and external narratives: the stories we take in, the stories we put out, as tools for self-creation and self-expression, especially but not uniquely as it relates to trauma. It has a vaguely inverted narrative, working backwards from Sean's adult life to his teenage injury. That's a lot going on for a fairly short book, and it works as often as not. The timeline can be difficult to keep straight, and the contrived narrative as often feels coy as compelling (in particular, I'm not happy that mental health issues are a "reveal"); Sean's voice is distant and cerebral, denying reader investment. But Trace Italian is fascinating, and functions well as a larger metaphor; thematically, the book coalesces. This is an absorbing effort, one which is ultimately successful but which I can't say I particularly enjoyed or recommend.
Author: John Darnielle
Published: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 180,290
Text Number: 530
Read Because: recommended by and borrowed from
century_eyesReview: As a teenager, Sean was hospitalized and left profoundly disfigured; to cope, he absorbed himself in the creation of a post-apocalyptic text-based game, Trace Italian. Wolf in White Van is a novel about internal and external narratives: the stories we take in, the stories we put out, as tools for self-creation and self-expression, especially but not uniquely as it relates to trauma. It has a vaguely inverted narrative, working backwards from Sean's adult life to his teenage injury. That's a lot going on for a fairly short book, and it works as often as not. The timeline can be difficult to keep straight, and the contrived narrative as often feels coy as compelling (in particular, I'm not happy that mental health issues are a "reveal"); Sean's voice is distant and cerebral, denying reader investment. But Trace Italian is fascinating, and functions well as a larger metaphor; thematically, the book coalesces. This is an absorbing effort, one which is ultimately successful but which I can't say I particularly enjoyed or recommend.
