Sarah, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Harvard-educated family teetering on divorce, finds herself traveling from town to town by Greyhound bus, trying to make a living as ""Tabitha,"" an exotic dancer, and come to terms with her past.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
If you take your raunch neat and don't demand too much characterization or satisfying connections, pick up Diana Atkinson's Highways and Dancehalls. Although short-listed for three big Canadian literary awards--the Governor General's Award for fiction, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Prize--it is, in the end, simply sad and sordid. Atkinson's litany of routine rapes, dead-end jobs, abusive boyfriends, and sex mills, narrated with a kind of glassy-eyed exhaustion, becomes as irreversible as a lobotomy.
Sarah, the 17-year-old daughter of Harvard-educated, Shakespeare-spouting parents, is also Tabitha, a stripper. She's a lousy waitress in an economy so bad that even waitresses boast two-page résumés. Her boyfriend's name is Lloyd, and we don't learn that much more about him. Because she's only 17 and wounded, the reader is expected to accept this dreadful, dope-dulled relationship. Sarah/Tabitha, through her journal-writing process, more or less pieces herself together on the highways and in the dancehalls of British Columbia's mining towns and middle-class suburbs. Underneath the vacuous delivery is a blighted intelligence yearning to redeem itself; Sarah will eventually come to terms with her shattered family life and the childhood illness that inflicted an even deeper psychological wounding.
Though Highways and Dancehalls is a somewhat engaging, gritty and hard-edged rhapsody to sleaze, the novel's limitations finally shred its credibility. Why should we want to revisit such a stale, sad setting as Lloyd's dark, depressing hippie pad, where the men "talk sports, cars, recent crimes, ancient torture methods, how you could commit the ultimate robbery. Most days the nailed-together kitchen table is hidden in smoke, beer bottles, dirty plates, R. Crumb comics, drug scissors, papers, and roaches." It's Sarah/Tabitha's friendships with other strippers that bring some authenticity and pathos to the narrative, but the ends, unlike those left by trailing G-strings, don't get tied up.
From Library Journal
"Maybe on some cloud up there the patron saint of exotic dancers sits, a curling wand in one hand, a Greyhound schedule in the other. She accepts offerings of tattoos and tears; she blesses you with safe passage." So writes 17-year-old Sarah, now "Tabitha," as she travels through British Columbia as a stripper. Her world is one of G-strings and T-bars, filthy venues, physical exhaustion and drugs, of brief friendships interrupting an otherwise intense loneliness. This debut by Canadian author Atkinson is Sarah's journal, describing in brutally honest detail not only life on the circuit but also her broken family life and childhood surgery that left a disfiguring scar. Atkinson writes with candor and a personal knowledge of life as a stripper, and it is this empathy that elevates the novel from voyeurism to moving testament of how one woman finds inner strength.?Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stripped the layers of B.S.,was a very refreashing read.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Highways and Dancehalls: A Novel (Hardcover)
Finally. Reality. Invaluable stark reality, is what I appreciate about Diana's novel. But its only for those with the balls to read real life. Whether you like it or not. The glamour of the exotic dancing profession is thrown out the window to a garbadge strewn, rain soaked ally, like the strippers gem studded thong flung to the floor. Reality can be beautiful, but Diana shows us the other very real side, the black ugliness of willing sexual stupidity. The willing, willful tendancies of the human mind to very purposely overlook the humanness of the objects of their sexual scorn or sexual titaliation. Any male or female who has ever witnessed a exotic dancer, or anyone who has been one, ought to read this, not only to appreciate the execellent literary read, but also as a type of "for your information" manal. Got the guts? Then read!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A literate stripper pens her story--better than average.,
By
This review is from: Highways and Dancehalls: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is the story about Sarah, or Tabitha, a stripper from BC. Many different aspects of her life conflict: her relationship with her mother and her father, her slug boyfriend Lloyd, and her own past history with disease that has disfigured her. She is highly intelligent and literate, in part owed to her father, an English professor. This makes her stand out among strippers. I found this book to be overwritten, and pretentious in some places. We get the feeling that Tabitha thinks she's better than the other strippers because she can quote Dante, yet she's exactly like the rest of them. I read the book all in one sitting, at the end just to get through it. There's no doubt that Atkinson can write. I'd like to see her try other, non-biographical topics.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing,
By A Customer
This review is from: Highways and Dancehalls: A Novel (Hardcover)
Worth reading if you're in the mood for something vaguely disgusting and troublingly realistic. Not a great pick for a sultry summer day.
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