Amazon.com Review
From the beginning of Scar Culture, the reader knows that something has gone wrong: the first-person accounts that form the bulk of Toni Davidson's debut have been found "at the scene." Who has done what to whom is the question driving this novel, moving it beyond the conventions of its psychiatric/criminal frame. In "Click" and "Fright" we are forced up against the more unsettling ways in which children live, or die--the book is part of the contemporary uncovering of the perversity of family life--as well as a few fragile metaphors of survival (if that is what they are). Click takes headshots recording the utter commotion of life with his mother and father, Exit and Panic; Fright passes into a state of waiting for his brother to return, for his (dead) mother "to sing something, anything, into my ear." Sad's narrative starts to pull the book together, or further apart, in its presentation of the madness of analysis, which becomes inseparable from the abuse it is supposed to cure. Within the tradition of a literary challenge to psychotherapy, Scar Culture is taking its chances, too, though it may become, in fact, a powerful contribution to this discipline. --Vicky Lebeau
From Publishers Weekly
Already a cult hit in Europe, Glasgow author Davidson's first novel tracks extremes of incest, abuse, desire, cruelty and illness as it uncovers the warped past and present of two grown boys named Click and Fright and their obsessive therapist, Curtis Sad. The adolescent Click lives in a trailer with his hideously abusive "mobile family," parents named Panic and Exit. Part one mixes Click's narration with descriptions of the photos he snaps as his family takes to the road, trying to outrun child welfare agents. Fright's tale (part two) details his father's incestuous brutality, conducted behind a mysterious flower curtain in the bedroom Fright shares with his brother, Jake; Fright's father may also have murdered Jake and their mother. Articulate therapist Sad narrates the rest of the book. Sad's greatest pleasures have long been his sexual dalliances with his little sister, Josie, about whom he keeps having hallucinations. (He also enjoys the pornographic hidden-camera footage given him by his more precarious patients.) When Click and Fright finally enter the mental health systemAtraumatized and uncommunicativeASad decides that he's the man to treat them. He and his thuggish co-workers go in search of his patients' memories via drugs, isolation and experimental regression. Sentence by chilly sentence, Davidson is a fine writer, proud of looking where others would turn away. All the scenes add up to a narrative composed mostly of rape, incest, confinement, violent erotic fantasies and their creative enactmentsApart Dennis Cooper, part Marquis de Sade. Davidson aims first and last to shock; on those terms his book is a roaring success. Judged by other standards, it seems forced and thin. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
