Customer Reviews

The Thin Place: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Reading the other reviews, I feel like a loser in that the book didn't work well for me. Somehow, I missed the genius and magic that others seemed to find and savor. The book is very fragmented, goes from the inner thoughts of animals (which to me were merely human's thoughts about what animals may be thinking versus what they are really thinking) to mundane observations about ordinary life that were rather boring and mostly unhelpful to me: An elderly 90 year old women with a son in his 60s who is still trying to date the right women, a young girl who can heal, beavers who are being mistreated, etc. The author tries to get graphic about certain sexual behavior and thoughts and yet to me, it was all very restrained and ultra conservative. A conservative trying to be shocking and yet retaining conservatism.

Furthermore, the constant thread of various religious meanings and interpretations didn't do much for me either as we float in and out of passages from the New Testament that deal with various things happening in today's world.

I would much prefer that she tell a great story in a less ethereal and more concrete way.

This is a story of what lies beneath the ordinary.

Told from many points of view including those of a dog and a beaver, this book tells the stories of ordinary people going about their lives in a northern U.S. town who have no idea how magical their lives truly are. There are deaths, romances, accidents, church committee meetings, old stories told, porcupines chased, and school operettas performed, while beyond the ordinary daily grind, nature churns on in an alarming fashion (if only we would notice it) and miracles (one character can raise the dead) go by unnoticed in the dash of everyday life.

Quirky and rewarding, I liked it so much I bought it in hardcover.

Amusingly, the flap copy for this book says that it is "about Mees Kipp..." Rarely does the copy writer get it so wrong. This is not a story, and certainly not "about" any one character. As other reviews have pointed out, it's a sequence of observations on or by different characters in a thin little universe bounded on all sides by a larger universe, or several of them. Hardly a new idea, but presented in a contemporary idiom and very well done. The book is a joy to read for its wry humor and its evocation of pity for the pitiless. It's my bias, but I think authors that try to delve into the psyche of animals come up looking a bit silly (_so_ sensitive, so new age) Davis barely manages to escape that. I could do without out it, but she brings it off better than most.

I read this book over the course of two days while lying on the couch recuperating from a summer cold. Davis' book kept me so entranced that by the time I had finished this wonderously hallucinatory tale, I had barely registered the discomforts that usually accompany these annoying bouts of cold symptoms. I heartily recommend this book to anyone (even if they don't have a cold).

Many times during the reading of this book - I considered putting it down and getting rid of it. It's not exactly an easy read - and I can't say that I was very engrosed in it - nor was I especially concerned about finding out how it ended. I had a hard time keeping track of who was who...but when I was in a character's mind - I did enjoy being there. I liked seeing, smelling, feeling the world through someone else's senses.

Though the flow of action was hard for me to get a grip on - the flow of the world, the feel of the season (summer) was very vivid. This is the 2nd book of Davis's that I've read - and as with the first one (The Walking Tour) - I spend most of the time feeling lost and as if I am walking around with blinders on - but what I can see is like a painting; true to life but larger than life. Dripping with color and texture and emotion, Davis's books are easy for me to appreciate but far more difficult to lose myself in.

This book is one of the most original pieces of fiction I have read in a long time, but I can see where it might not be for everyone.
It required me to think "ouside of the box". Some of the passages actually left me breathless with amazement. Others made me scratch my head and think: "Huh?". But all in all - it is an awesome book that defies description.
It changed the way I think about the world - and, for me, that's what good fiction is all about.

Each chapter of The Thin Place is a different view of every day life in animal, plant and human form in the New England town of Varennes. It also goes back in time to its former citizens and how their lives were impacted by a tragic accident. This novel remindes me of Alice Hoffman, but in a more far out version. The final chapters blow you away with a culmination of all the characters being visited by a disastrous event. It delivers a punch that wasn't expected. I was stunned and wowed at the same time. Yet life goes on in Varennes, with all its banality and complexities. It will definitely stay in my library.