Publishers Weekly
12/23/2019
Prescott debuts with a promising allegory of an Australia in cultural and economic flux. An unnamed narrator moves to the Central West of New South Wales, planning to work on a book about rural towns in the region that have “simply disappeared” from the landscape along with the people who lived in them. After renting a room and getting a job in a grocery store, where he plays back dictations of his work in progress, vaguely planned as a hybrid of journalism and horror, the narrator befriends his roommate Rob’s girlfriend, Ciara, a DJ with a late-night slot at a community radio station. Her feedback on the narrator’s book (“she couldn’t tell whether the book was fiction or fact”) echoes questions that are sure to emerge from the reader. As bottomless holes start appearing throughout the town, people and buildings begin to vanish, the cost of goods increases, and civic order unravels. Ciara, who’s broken up with Rob, plans an escape with the narrator. While the ephemeral details wear thin (“As the town disappeared, so did my grip on any particular town truth”), Prescott brilliantly captures the disconcerting effect of a town’s changing storefronts, people, and customs on the newcomer and Ciara, offering stark reflections on the young characters’ search for a sense of definition and permanence. Prescott is off to a strong start. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"The Town is an impressive debut; perhaps most so for how Prescott maintains its singular and beguiling mood for the entirety of the novel—part comic satire, part existential horror. Prescott effectively conveys the sense that history and art seem incapable of reflecting the calamity of our present moment." —Zach Ravas, zyzzyva
"A bizarre novel—A seance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino. Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity." —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers
"The Town moves with a gentle command amid the obvious reference points of Calvino, Kafka and Ave, but it also invokes the less-celebrated novels of Steve Erickson and Rex Warner. Like them, Prescott seeks the universal in a meticulous paraphrase of the here and now, and finds the dislocation hiding in locality to show us just how lost we really may be." —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude
"The Town really got under my skin. There's a deceptive lightness to Prescott's style, so this is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you're swept away by, even bound to, this thing that's so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me." —Lisa McInerney, author of The Blood Miracles
"Shaun Prescott's debut novel is a dense singularity, an exploration of the idea of nowhere as the centre of the world, and a stark paean to loneliness, entropy and marginal existence—sustained by the kind of slow, luminous prose that feels like the equivalent of staring straight into the sun." —David Keenan, author of England's Hidden Reverse
"A gentle, if gnawing, safari of the existential dread on which Australia is built." —The Saturday Paper (Australia)
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-25
A writer goes searching for vanished Australian communities in this dark allegorical debut.
The (fittingly) nameless narrator of this novel has a notion to write a book about the "disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales," so he arrives in a (fittingly) nameless community to conduct his research. But what's to investigate? Commerce seems restricted to a Woolworths and a bar nobody patronizes; the annual community get-together always degrades into fisticuffs; Ciara, the DJ at the local radio station whom he befriends, suspects nobody is tuning in; and the librarian has no history to point to. In some ways the novel can be read as a kind of lament for a disappearing sense of community and willful ignorance of the past; the nameless town is what you get when you have an infrastructure (homes, roads, train lines) but no sense of a social contract. But the narrator's (and Prescott's) affect is so cool that it resists characterization as a critique or satire; the novel at times recalls the slacker-lit of Douglas Coupland, all emotional blankness and deep skepticism about humanity. The novel gets something of a lift in its latter portions as the narrator's friendship with Ciara deepens (though, pointedly, the relationship remains platonic) as they try to find out who's sending cassettes of eerie music to the station. And when seemingly bottomless holes begin appearing in town, the novel acquires a kind of deadpan comedy as the town begins to swallow up its own: "Then [the holes] started to consume furniture, and thoroughfares, and places where people might sometimes want to stand." It's no small feat to conjure up a town in fiction solely through what it lacks, but the place is hard to settle into, as a metaphor or anything else.
A conceptually ingenious if chilly dystopian yarn.
