The Thin Place: A Novel [Hardcover]

Kathryn Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2006

The prize-winning author of Versailles tells the story of a small New England village unsettled by a young girls unearthly gift. In Varennes, a town near the Canadian border, three girls come across the body of a dead man on the local lakes beach. Two of them run to get help, but twelve-year-old Mees Kipp stays with the body and somehow, inexplicably, brings it back to life. Her mysterious gift is at the center of this haunting and transcendent novel. THE THIN PLACE is the story of these girls, their town, and the worldly and otherworldly forces that come into play there over one summer. Writing at the peak of her powers, Kathryn Davis draws on commonplace formspolice blotters, garden almanacs, Sunday sermons, horoscopes, and diariesto convey the rich rhythms of life in Varennes. From the ladies in the old-folks home to trappers, lawyers, teachers, ministers, drug addictseven the dogs and cats, beavers and bearsshe peoples this novel with astonishingly vivid beings. The extraordinary comes to visit an ordinary town.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Davis stretches relationships over centuries and species in this loopy follow-up to her historical, Versailles. When three schoolgirls come upon a seemingly dead neighbor, Mr. Banner, prostrate on the beach, he is revived by the uncanny spiritual powers of one of the girls, Mees Kipp, a strange fatherless waif who is also able to communicate with dogs. The narrative's point-of-view jumps among various characters (including a dog) as Davis explores the teeming, deceitful, hidden lives of the small church-going community and teases out its history via the journal of a late 19th-century schoolmarm who harbors a secret passion. (She perished with her pupils in what has become known as the Sunday School Outing Disaster; the 1870s tragedy still haunts the town.) Meanwhile, in the Crockett Home for the Aged, sharp-witted Helen Zeebrugge, at 92, simmers at the stupidity and condescension of her caretakers; her only son, Piet, in his vigorous 60s, is looking for wife number five and is tired of dating the athletic French teacher at the high school. With her eye on Piet, 50-ish divorcée Billie Carpenter, new to town and unattached, possesses the clarity to grasp the larger supernatural realignment that's taking place in Varennes, as evil (or senseless mortality) is replaced by a life-affirming force: love. (Jan.)
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From The New Yorker

In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town's every waking moment. The experiences of Mees's dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister's wife reading her morning paper and "confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight." In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it's just another moment in a particular place.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 277 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.; 1ST edition (January 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316735043
• ISBN-13: 978-0316735049
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,298,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A realization of Whitman?, January 30, 2006

By 

James Hiller (Beaverton, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Thin Place: A Novel (Hardcover)

Kathryn Davis is a new author to me. Critically recognized for some of her other work, Davis has somehow managed to stay in the popular shadows of fiction. Now, with the publication of her sixth book, The Thin Place, hopefully this will drag her into the light of being well known, inventive, and incredibly literate.

This book tells the tale of the citizens of Varennes, a little town close to the Canadian border, who are also closely connected by little silver threads of desire, envy, anger, greed, love, lust, and growth. It starts with three girls finding a body on the beach, and one of the girls striving for the miraculous and bringing the man back to life. Over the pages we meet an elderly lady living in a retirement home, her son who jumps from marriage to marriage because he loves women, another woman who restores books, one who ushers in church, a teacher who is putting on a play for his students which brings us back to the girls.

The Thin Place is by no means an easy novel or a quick read. It demands your attention from the first page, and should anything wrestle your focus away for even a moment, you find yourself lost. Partially this is due to Davis' incredible fluid writing style. One might liken it to a stream running over your page, as attention shifts about in a scene much as if a camera would in filming erratically. It's in this fluidity that the beauty of Davis' prose rests. She doesn't ignore the meager nor the less-important, everything gets a voice in her writing; from dogs, to beaver, to lichen to the ice sheets moving over the earth in its great sculpting array.

Much of this reminds me of Whitman and his poetry. As he strove to encompass all around him in his verse, Davis strives to encompass all in her paragraphs. The effect, for both, in enlighting and illuminating. Both highlight the interconnectedness of everything; of how we all live in dangerously tight webs and should not expect to move without effecting all around.

The Thin Place is a great novel. It is demanding, exacting, and noticing all. It is a gentle roller coaster ride in literature that you never quite sure when you'll get off, but when you do, you'll want to get on all over again.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary read!, January 18, 2006

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Thin Place: A Novel (Hardcover)

Rarely does a book come out that silences and humbles the reader. The Thin Place is one of this select few. By weaving the metaphysical, religious and philosophical search for meaning into the characters of a common, typical town, Kathryn Davis is able to take the reader with her on a quest for understanding. No aspect of creation is too minute, its role too trivial for notice as part of the world around us, a world we may not really see, a life we not really feel.

The Thin Place is a town like every other town in the world, full of people, animals, plant life and death. The small town of Verennes is home to schoolteachers and book binders, elderly ladies and young girls, bankers and reverends. Animals run throughout the town, escaping together to explore, protect and disappear--family pets and the wild ones. Pansies and the peonies grow there as does the lichen that flourishes as it has for thousands of years. The young can bring back the dead while the elderly can only watch.

Mees and friends since kindergarten are teetering on the edge of teen years. Lorne is the child forever looking for a home. Sunny is the pretty one, the good one, the boss of all. "Three girls, arms linked, shadows misleadingly alike." Only Mees can bring resurrection, a gift that seems timeless but one that can be lost forever in the tumor of evil. In an ending that both satisfies and surprises, Mees' talent proves to be uncontrollable and unreliable as virtue clashes with sin.

Kathryn Davis' extraordinary novel gives voice to the creation of the world, its progress and its potential ending. She creates the threads that follow the events of the past as they unravel into our present and our future. Embedded in the realities of diaries, police blotters and almanacs, the ordinary are extraordinary. The characters live with little notice of their effect on each other or on the world around them. Like the green Dodge Dart and war, the foxes and the flowers that quietly weave their way barely noticed throughout the story, so do the characters as they live, and die, barely having left a mark, never having heard the music.

"Space and time are made out of strings the universe conceived when it was still a baby, little and fierce. The strings wove together, they collided with other strings, releasing even smaller strings which were the new dimensions, humming, humming, humming. If a human being had been there to hear that music, it would have killed him. Eventually the strings made waves, some smaller than the smallest thing we've discovered so far, some greater than the distance between our world and the farthest star."

Armchair Interviews says: Highly recommended as an extraordinary read.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Different for everyone - but worth the "trouble", June 27, 2006

By 

JET (Parker, CO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Thin Place: A Novel (Hardcover)

The premise of the story has been summarized by other reviewers, so I won't take the time to do it here, but I will note that I bought this book after reading a review, thinking that it was going to be more focused on the supernatural, the review leading me to think that the focus was the "thin place," the division between this world and the next that is thinner in Varennes than in other places. I envisioned ghosts or magical realism, of sorts. In short, this book was not what I expected.

That being said, there is an element of the supernatural in this book, but only one element. The whole of the book is based firmly and viscerally in reality. Davis has an extremely keen ability at description and fluid prose, one of the best I've read, and I often found myself delighted by the aptness of her descriptions, putting into words ideas that have fleetingly crossed my mind (like the description of dogs' heads smelling of popcorn).

Other reviewers, and friends of mine that have read the book, have found it confusing, or difficult to stick with. I disagree - although there are many characters, and the prose deviates regularly from the plot (i.e., the daily lives of the town's residents, and how their paths ultimately cross) to describe the thoughts of beavers, moose, lichen, or to meditate on the creation of the world, or to jump back to medieval times to explore events of the Bible - it was easy to form a picture of the place, to differentiate the characters, and to understand the prevailing themes of interconnectedness and transience.

For some, this will be the story of a town and its residents. For others, this will be a religious novel, while others will find it a philosophical journey. Whatever the book is to each reader, I know that it will be unlike anything you have read before, and you will get something out of it, IF you open your mind and let yourself be swept away with the current of the story.