Tideland [Paperback]

Mitch Cullin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2003

Moving from Los Angeles to rural Texas with her junkie father after her mother's death, Jeliza-Rose drifts from the harsh reality of her childhood into a new life. Escaping into the fantasies of her own over-active imagination she discovers fireflies with names, bog men who awaken at dusk, and monster sharks swimming down railroad tracks. Her collection of disembodied Barbie heads share in her adventures along with her real friend Dickens. In the tradition of such cult classics as Iain Banks's THE WASP FACTORY and Patrick McCabe's THE BUTCHER BOYy, and playfully recalling ALICE IN WONDERLAND, TIDELAND, Tideland is a brilliantly dark and ingenious creation. Set in a landscape populated with singular characters and stark imagery, TIDELAND illuminates those moments when the fantastic emerges from seemingly common occurrences and lives - and a lonely child discovers magic and danger behind even the most mundane of events.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Traces of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and faint echoes of the horror film classic Psycho infuse this highly charged, eccentrically imaginative narrative by the author of Branches. The unusual tale comprises mainly dialogues between 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose and her four bodiless Barbie doll heads as she wanders about the isolated landscape of a house beside the railroad tracks in bleak rural Texas, interrupted periodically by the dynamite exploding in a nearby limestone quarry. Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose. The girl's father, 67-year-old Noah, a drug-addicted, has-been rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes his abused, disturbed daughter on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home. There Noah pins a map of Denmark on the wall and sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose soon encounters Dell, an eccentric neighbor woman who wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens. Precocious (and often pretentious) conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her Barbie heads (one is named Classique) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's appalling secret, a grotesque history is revealed. This brutal portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood requires immersion in her fevered imagination, and is relieved only at the end by Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself from total breakdown. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

Cullin returns to the rural Texas landscape of his Whompyjawed (1999) and Branches (p. 5), in a narrative that veers unevenly between mordant humor and a self-conscious quirkiness that too often undercuts his real gift for language and invention.The precocious and preternaturally observant adolescent narrator, Jeliza-Rose, is a classic American literary type reminiscent of Harper Lee's Scout and Carson McCullers's Frankie. After her mother dies of a drug overdose, Jeliza-Rose and her father move from Los Angeles to Texas, returning to What Rocks, the farm that belonged to her late grandmother. Her father, Noah-also a former junkie-is a gifted guitarist and songwriter who dreams of moving to Denmark. Why Denmark? Like much else here, the reason seems rooted less in a coherent narrative structure than in authorial whimsy. Nothing particularly pressing keeps father and daughter living at What Rocks, other than a lack of money and of will to go anywhere else. Jeliza-Rose is left to fend for herself, and, like children everywhere, she has a prodigious imagination that keeps her continually diverted while her neglectful father lapses into a terminal dreaminess. She befriends a lonely scarecrow of a man called Dickens, an eccentric woman, Dell, who likes to wander around wearing a beekeeper's protective mask, and a stuttering boy named Patrick. Jeliza-Rose also calls on a large collection of Barbie dolls for amusement. Cullin has a wonderful feel for the big and wide Texas landscape that Jeliza-Rose finds herself in. His descriptions of how a child can happily lose herself in the long grass, wildflowers, and mesquite are lyrical without being precious.There's not much of a story for Cullin to hang his sharply drawn, often poignant evocation of childhood on. Still, his feel for the painful awkwardness and sensitivity of adolescence is worth the trip. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (April 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0297829491
• ISBN-13: 978-0297829492
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,801,981 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Alice in Suburbia, September 8, 2006

By 

Itamar Katz (Ramat-Gan, Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tideland (Paperback)

Tideland is a fascinating read that stops just short of being good enough to be considered a classic. Even if at first it seems just another updated version of Alice In Wonderland / The Wizard of Oz / The Neverending Story etc. - a child creating a fantasy world as a way of dealing with difficulties of life and a metaphor for growing up - it becomes abundantly clear very early on that Jeliza-Rose's story is a very different one from those of Alice and Dorothy. Tideland is decisively stronger and darker than those classics, and subtlety is all but forgotten; Mitch Cullin makes no attempt to disguise the horrors he writes about or to disguise his novel as a children's tale. Tideland is definitely a novel for adults, and Cullin gives the reader the awful truth straight and headlong.

That is the novel's strength but also its weakness. All too often Cullin seems to be bent on shocking the reader in any manner available to him, and the hopelessness of Jeliza-Rose's life is so obvious and overwhelming, the novel soon becomes unbearably depressing. Jeliza-Rose's optimism fails to convince; her situation is too impossible, and she is obviously far too disturbed and distorted to be taken seriously as a narrator. Which brings me to the biggest problem I had with the novel - even though I got past all the others, this kept bugging me. Cullin seems not entirely certain of the manner and style in which he narrates his story. The story is told in the past tense - in a way that hints at a long period of time passed between the event and the telling. However, Jeliza-Rose as a narrator seems sometimes aware of her situation and sometimes not; sometimes the story is told from the point of view of a little girl in a disturbed state of mind, sometimes that of a grown woman looking back at her own harsh childhood. And all too often Cullin's own voice creeps into the mix.

With that chronic stylistic problem in mind, the story of Tideland is still fascinating enough to be an excellent read. Yes, it's depressing and it's frustrating, but it's also not too long for its own good and fueled with enough humor, morbid and dark though it is, to make it quick and engrossing. Tideland is not an easy read, but a difficult and pessimistic tale. While it falls somewhat between the lines, not at all working as a mature and sophisticated children's tale and not quite complete enough to be a real literary classic - Tideland fails to reach the full of its potential but it's filled with original and enticing imagery and descriptions, and a terrific little story. I'm excited to see it transformed to the big screen by the great Terry Gilliam, because the dark and surreal imagery has great cinematic potential and Gilliam is probably the best man to bring out the book's terrific potential. It's all too likely that the film will be good enough to completely overshadow the novel, but it's still worth checking out.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cullin's best, May 25, 2001

By 

Martin T. Scott (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tideland (Hardcover)

Both poetic and thrilling, the best thing about this novel in the texture: the language and visual imagery are both stunning. This is a wonderful take on a twisted childhood, and so it's no surpirise Terry Gilliam will direct the movie version: the surreal and dreamy misprision is right up his alley. One might quibble that the voice of the narrator in the novel would be beyond that of a child, but the payoff of the reading experience is probably worth the suspension of disbelief.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic and Shocking, June 1, 2001

By 

KC (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tideland (Hardcover)

Tideland seized my imagination from the first page, and I think most readers will follow Cullin's extraordinary conceptions with astonishment and delight. Told in the past tense, thus suggesting a good deal of time has passed before its telling, Jeliza-Rose's adventures among the mesquites are haunting, strange, and often beautiful. Her encounters with the odd pair of Dell and Dickens come at a welcome time, yet leads us down an even darker path of family secrets and hidden boxes of dynamite.

Considering Tideland came just months after Cullin's Branches and only a few months before his equally wonderful but different The Cosmology of Bing, one can only imagine what this very talented and singular storyteller has up his sleeve next. Until then, I highly recommend the curious world of Tideland, which is a work of so unusual a nature as to throw new light on Cullin's already brilliant career.