He moves through the plot with an enviable looseness. Unsurprisingly, Darnielle's prose is lucid and precise, the sort of clear-eyed, knife-jab sentences that defined both his debut Wolf in White Van and his whole songwriting career.
The modern-day family attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery that's driving the whole plot, but even these realizations come to us only in bits and pieces. Irene - furthest in the past and untroubled by the mystery she's unknowingly participating in - searches for peace and satisfaction. Jeremy's fixation on the tapes - aided by a tenacious patron and his own boss' descent into obsession - is moderated by the sweet, slow waltz between him and his widower father, who gently tries to get Jeremy to do something more with his life. A mysterious I also occasionally drifts into an otherwise third-person story, dropping philosophical clues and letting the reader know that someone else is most definitely in charge.Īs A Lyricist And Novelist, The Mountain Goats' Lead Man Writes About Pain The plot moves fluidly between three time periods: the 1990s, when an aimless, small-town video store employee named Jeremy discovers unsettling clips spliced onto random films rented out by his store the 1970s, when a young wife and mother, Irene, falls in with a cult following a garbage-eating drifter and the present day, when a retired couple and their college-aged children find a cache of disturbing videos in the basement of their newly-purchased farmhouse. This question does not lie precisely at the heart of Universal Harvester - the second novel from singer-songwriter John Darnielle - but certainly informs it at every turn. In a way, stories are our most prolific and dangerous serial killers, leaving behind plucky orphans, kind but overbearing widowers, the occasional wicked stepmother, and two questions: Where on earth did the mothers go? And why? Critics and scholars tie themselves in knots trying to identify the cultural significance of the missing-mother trope, which is pervasive and shows no signs of letting up. You may have noticed that mothers don't do so well in literature – stories both classic and contemporary tend to bump them off.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Universal Harvester Author John Darnielle
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