05/02/2016
Ducornet has made an estimable career mining often bizarre, horrifying, or otherwise unpredictable territory. This novel is perhaps her most accessible book, which she achieves without sacrificing the trademark fluidity of her language or her penchant for making heroes out of odd and unlikely figures. The hero is Stub, a damaged and orphaned teenager who hangs around a college campus, masquerading as a student named Charter Chase. He eats food he steals from houses and lives in the storage room of the library. There, Stub/Charter becomes the devoted reader of a reclusive and ignored philosopher named Verner Vanderloon, whose works of eccentric anthropology include Primates in Paradise and Cannibal Ways; Stub also becomes fascinated with Asthma, the child of a local history professor. In the singular and enchanted Asthma—who lectures her toys, speculates on the religious leanings of the beetles in her backyard, and renames Stub “Brightfellow”—Stub finds a dreamer like himself. After he is adopted by doddering professor emeritus William Sweetbriar, the two become a sort of ersatz family to the young imposter. But Stub is harboring secrets no one suspects, and just as the discovery of his charade comes to seem inevitable, his obsession with Asthma takes a darker turn. Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence. (July)
Ms. Ducornet’s novel about a man who ‘cannot fathom the bottomless secret of his own existence’ casts a lingering spell.” —New York Times“In tracing the shape of what is left behind, Ducornet lends dignity to the universal plight of vanished illusions. We cannot help but empathize with Stub’s perpetual dream, ‘when everything dissolves and something epic takes over, something coherent, a thing that again and again surpasses itself.’” —Los Angeles Times, "Rikki Ducornet's Brightfellow is a Sophisticated Embodiment of Children's Imagination”“Bursting with vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters, and the striking perspective of an emotionally stunted man in a carefully controlled society, Ducornet’s tale is unique and captivating.” —Booklist“A portrait of a surreal community that defies easy categorization. Like poetry, the novel's central aims are to revel in language and investigate the inner lives of characters who see a world that is more numinous (to borrow a word of Stub's) than the people around them can recognize. This makes Ducornet's choice to focus on anthropologists and young children satisfyingly apt. . . . An endless delight at the sentence level…” —Kirkus“Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence.” —Publishers Weekly“A dreamily written yet unsentimental meditation on what we do to survive.” —Library Journal“Brimming with lyrical descriptions of the campus and with ornamental characters representing various academic ‘types,’ Brightfellow is both a portrait of small town American campus life and of the peculiarities of childhood.” —Manhattan Book Review"Rikki Ducornet's novel Brightfellow is surreal and vivid, and cements her status as one of the most talented writers working today." —Largehearted Boy, "Book Notes"“Ducornet’s is a world of surfaces so rich and textured that notions of meaning and interpretation are subsumed under a lush and seductive prose that eventually inhabits readers' minds.” —The Millions“Ducornet’s prose always seduces, fulfills, and rewards. Her novels are prose rich cabinets of curiosity, the lines filled with obscure and puzzling wonders. Brightfellow is no exception.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn”A delicate and airy novel, Brightfellow combusts with beautiful words and sentences.” —Numero Cinq“[H]ere, the quotidian and the strange will rapidly become intertwined.” —Star Tribune"Brightfellow’s symbolically perfect ending...is true to Ducornet’s thematic lament." —Cleaver Magazine"Linguistically explosive . . . one of the most interesting American writers around." —The Nation“It is Rikki Ducornet’s magic to be able to coax an entire universe—‘restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence’—out of the modest and often grim contours of one man’s life. It’s one man, Brightfellow, whose job it is to simultaneously inhabit and invent and contain and protect and destroy this place of copperheads and academics, bad mothers and islands, a savant scholar and a little girl. He also knows how to break our hearts and fan the fires of hope.” —Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex“Ducornet is a mad maestro of words.” —Seattle Weekly
“In Brightfellow, Ducornet… reveals strangeness in the most basic circumstances of life, flooding them in new light.”—Kenyon Review“Beautifully done, Brightfellow is a tiny, but surprisingly complex, gem.” —Powell's, "Staff Picks"“Writer, poet, and artist Ducornet does things with words most authors would never even dream of. . . It’s a novel that's bizarre, engaging, and dark as hell.” —Men's Journal, "The Best Books of July"“Rikki Ducornet has long been known for her surreal, vivid writing. Brightfellow, her latest novel, is no exception.” —KQED“[Brightfellow] focuses its gaze on the refuse of life—things that are lost, tossed out, abandoned—and makes them beautiful through her mastery of imagery and voice.” —Summerset Review, review“Rikki Ducornet, in the effervescent and airy Brightfellow, deftly executes a hefty lightness, the lightest of a bright, light touch that delights and spontaneously combusts right before our eyes. Like an unbounded baron in the trees, like a goat boy on the loose in the groves of academe, this book inscribes a lofty scaffolding of amazing mazes, canopies of wonder. Ignited luminescence, irresistible levitation, iridescent images—the words skip like philosophic stones through a saturated and shimmering exhalation.” —Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana“An engagement with the sometimes fickle quirks of evolution is perhaps Ducornet’s most striking contribution to the art of surrealism and the metafictional terrain of Calvino and Borges. . .As a devout reinterpreter of the world, [Stub] represents the best of Ducornet’s fiction, and the hope of creative, loving life through the experience of play.” —Publishers Weekly, “The Burden of Strangeness”
07/01/2016
If Ducornet (Netsuke) typically writes fiction that reads like fable, this story of wild child Stub is a dark fairy tale indeed, with the sparkle of black opals. After Stub's irritable mother vanishes and his loving but ineffectual father withdraws in his grief, Stub hides himself to a nearby college and lives there surreptitiously, befriending the librarian, sleeping in little-used spaces, and stealing food and clothing. As he says with typical adolescent self-regard, What if my life is not only the mirror of my own thwarted destiny, or the mirror of mankind's thwarted destiny, but the mirror of my species' capacity to overcome the worst odds? Stub is certainly a remarkable survivor but a thief and liar as well, managing to live on campus for many years and finally getting himself invited into the home of addled professor Billy. He passes himself off as Charter Chase, a Fulbright student from Australia, and he's pleased that Billy lives next door to little Asthma, the daughter of self-absorbed academics, whom Stub befriends not pruriently but because she's an abandoned child like himself. But can he keep up the charade? VERDICT A dreamily written yet unsentimental meditation on what we do to survive.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
2016-04-13
A lonely young man poses as a scholar to gain a sense of community. After his mother abandons the family and his father "falls apart," adolescent Stub decides to use a nearby college campus as his home, sleeping in labs, purloining clothes from gym lockers, and stealing food from faculty housing. A perpetual outsider, he watches the dysfunctional lives of the professors in "the Circle," a ring of faculty houses where the dramas of "the soused faculty wives and their brats" play out. One day, Stub is discovered in the college library by professor emeritus Billy poring over the works of an obscure anthropologist; Stub pretends to be a Fulbright scholar working on a dissertation, and Billy offers him a room at his faculty home in the Circle. Stub's new study overlooks the bedroom of 8-year-old Asthma, an imaginative little girl with whom Stub becomes obsessed. However, Stub's life as an academic imposter threatens to undo his relationships with both Billy and Asthma, the first people he has cared about since his fraught childhood. In her slim novel, Ducornet (The Deep Zoo, 2014, etc.), who is also a well-known poet, crafts a portrait of a surreal community that defies easy categorization. Like poetry, the novel's central aims are to revel in language and investigate the inner lives of characters who see a world that is more numinous (to borrow a word of Stub's) than the people around them can recognize. This makes Ducornet's choice to focus on anthropologists and young children satisfyingly apt. But readers may find themselves yearning for something more substantial from the narrative than just meditation and lyricism—the novel's hasty and confusing climax exemplifies the ways Ducornet only sporadically considers plot. An endless delight at the sentence level but lacking in big-picture propulsion.
