The Walking Tour [Paperback]

Kathryn Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 8, 1999

It is the turn of this century. Two couples -- businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow and Snow's wife Ruth Farr -- have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who's taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge. By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This walking tour ends, literally, at a jumping-off place. It ends, too, at the end of the world. Kathryn Davis's beautifully written tale begins and ends in Wales, a country she would have us believe is looped and configured with myths that govern modern life as well as they did in the days of yore. Four Americans--two couples--make a trip there at the end of the 20th century. By journey's end, two of the four will disappear in a mist on the Gower peninsula. Years later, Susan, the daughter of one of the couples, cobbles their story together from diaries, court documents, and letters. The novel teeters between the Wales of the walking tour and the gray, mysterious, post-Apocalyptic world she endures.

Davis is very funny, in the English-country-house comedy-of-manners tradition--on the tour itself, making free with the unsavory combination of precious historicizing and raw sexual tension that characterizes such holidays. And she may well have a thing about vegetarians, who are well represented. "St. David's? Most Welsh churches seemed to be named for him, a man who subsisted on leeks and water and caused a hill to grow under his feet so he could address his disciples from a lofty position, more or less in the spirit of modern-day vegetarians." The satire jostles along nicely, full of prickly insults and off-balance observations.

Bobby Rose and Coleman Snow, the two husbands, run a company, SnowWhite & RoseRead, that has invented a kind of overwriting device, a computer program that detects vulnerability in texts and allows readers to rewrite them. This program may or may not have precipitated a kind of holocaust of meaning, where Susan is forced to dwell now that her parents have quit the scene. If this all sounds a little vague, it is. In retrospect, Susan muses, "But how did it work, I wonder? By which I mean, morally, not technically. What came over people that they'd let other people fool around with their words, their sentences, their ideas, their dreams?" Dunno, but at a certain point, one starts to wonder how it worked technically, not morally. Don't expect a punch-line, end-of-novel answer, for it never comes. Davis hangs a huge amount of millennial, late-capitalist baggage from this invention, and yet we never properly find out what exactly it is. You can make out the kernel, just barely, within the mist. But the mist starts to give you a headache, and you yearn to get back to the really rather good yarn of the four people going for a walk in Wales. On the other hand, a headachy mist is just the effect Davis seems to be after in her fourth novel. For readers seeking to be unmoored, this is a heady, misty read indeed. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

Davis's fourth and thoroughly engaging novel (after Hell) is a witty blend of genres: mystery, courtroom drama, futuristic tale and a reworking of Welsh myth. In some unspecified year in the 21st century, when ideologies have transformed to the point where "the whole idea of edge... [has]... become a thing of the past," Susan R. Rose hides away on Maine's coast, in what was once her family home, reconstructing the events that led to her mother's disappearance and certain death during a walking tour through Wales, when Susan was 13. Equipped with letters and cards sent by her mother, a famous painter; a stack of unlabeled photos; a transcript from a wrongful death suit; and a laptop notebook her mother's oldest friend (and deepest rival) kept, Susan pieces together the spats, jealousies and sudden couplings of the tourists on a pilgrimage. Although she is at first alone, Susan's privacy is invaded by Monkey, a boy encamped nearby. He's a Strag, a member of a futuristic culture that is propertyless and thus lawless, "a triumph of the virtual." As in any good mystery, several possible suspects emerge with a variety of reasons to have killed Carole Ridingham Rose (even Monkey could hold a clue), yet Davis manages to keep this plot line alive while ingeniously weaving her imaginative settings. The playfulness of Davis's writing is irresistible. Laced with fairy tales, neologisms and poems, her prose is clever, sometimes dazzling, skating lightly over complex ideas that otherwise might bog down the narrative. Looking at an Andy Warhol painting, Susan's father says to her mother, "I like it. It's like money; it skips the middle step." One insistent theme surfacing in this highly original novel is the relationships between property and morality, between time and space. Davis's take on these subjects is intellectually rigorous, while the suspense remains satisfyingly taut. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (November 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395945410
• ISBN-13: 978-0395945414
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,280,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking, November 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Walking Tour (Paperback)

I really wouldn't care much what Kathryn Davis writes about- her prose is seamless and poetic, the mere way she puts words together is absolutely breathtaking. However the Walking Tour is also a fine story, filled with mystery, emotion, and mythology; it is a tour from the near future back to the past. Once you've begun these exquisitely tuned pages, you will not want it to end.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Irritatingly vague, February 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Walking Tour (Paperback)

I had high hopes for this one and ended up pretty disappointed. Yes, the writing is wonderful, and I enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the walking tour--it's the only thing that kept me reading, actually. But Susan's apocalyptic near future is too mysterious. So is the reason she is only now trying to figure out what happened during her parents' trip. You can't help expecting that there is going to be some link--even only psychologically--between this trip gone wrong and the world gone wrong that Susan lives in--but no, there doesn't seem to be. We don't even know what happened to the surviving two members of this foursome after the trip. Nor do we have any idea who Susan is or how she changed because of what happened. I also disliked nearly all the walking tour participants. Ruth--blah, Bobby--yuck, Brenda--awful. And while Carole intrigued me, I was never convinced of her supposed instability except for the very bizarre postcards she sent to the poor 13-year-old Susan. In the accounts of the trip itself, she often seemed like the most understandable member of the group. And then Monkey--who was he, so menacing and perceptive and intrusive. And in the end, apparently an artist as great as Carole, as well. All in all I think it could have been a better read if Davis had provided just a bit more of a foothold in Susan's world.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Feast Not a Happy Meal, March 14, 2003

By 

The Prof "kiddielitman" (Loveland, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Walking Tour (Paperback)

Kathryn Davis's The Walking Tour is an ambitious exploration of the human urge to understand the present as the product of the past. Who writes the histories, tells the stories, makes the myths that humans embrace as they attempt to make sense of existence? The answer, this novel suggests, is that it's just ordinary people who do, ordinary people just like those of us reading the novel.

Susan Rose narrates Davis's complex mosaic of Welsh myth, contemporary painting, computer technology, and the timeless passions of human beings: greed, lust, love, envy, the urge to create art. Susan attempts to understand what caused the disastrous and fatal events that transpired during a walking tour of Wales undertaken by her parents, Bobby, a wealthy and powerful internet magnate, and Carole, a world-renowned painter who has struggled with schizophrenia her whole life; and their friends, Coleman Snow, Bobby's business partner, and Ruth Farr, his would-be novelist wife. Relying upon a variety of documentary sources--Ruth's digital journal, Coleman's vacation photos, Carole's picture postcards, and the transcript of a civil lawsuit that followed the tour--Susan struggles to piece together a coherent vision of what happened, why it happened, and what it means.

The novel's brilliance resides in Davis's adept handling of a complex narrative over which she never loses control. The story unfolds as a mystery of sorts, but what makes it memorable is how Davis places her readers in the same position as Susan Rose: we too must attempt to create a myth, tell ourselves a story, create a history that will account for the information we encounter. And that's no easy task. The novel invites misreadings and even at times may frustrate us. However, it would be quite a challenge for any reader to dig into her or his own past in the way Susan does without becoming frustrated and confused at times. Why should Susan's search be any easier for readers than it is for her?

The novel's use of Welsh mythology produces a resonance and depth to the story: Susan--and her readers--are doing no more and no less than the Welsh themselves when they created the myths that lent meaning to their own past and present. "The Walking Tour" does not serve up a bland, easy-to-digest Happy Meal but instead offers a feast. Readers will need to be alert and will have to concentrate on the text, but for those who do, the reward is a memorable experience. A terrific book for readers who welcome ambiguity and depth in their reading.