Reviews for Dust

The average rating for Dust based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-28 00:00:00 Norberto Rojas (4.5) This modern classic, unfairly forgotten, deserves to be considered on par with A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley) and Stoner (John Williams). It won a PEN/Hemingway first novel prize in 1984. Luckily, last year's NYRB Classics reprint might just bring it the attention it deserves. Told in the relatively rare first-person plural ("we" - a perspective I love) and set on an Ohio farm, the novel captures what four girl cousins on the cusp of adolescence learn and remember about their troubled family. The Krauss clan is peculiarly matriarchal, ruled by Gram - whose imperiousness (the cousins also describe her as "flamboyantly, joylessly unpredictable") has earned her the nickname alluded to in the title. She has five daughters and four granddaughters who spend summers on the farm with her: Anne and Katie are Aunt Grace's daughters, and Celia and Jenny are Aunt Libby's - but as is so often the case with the first-person plural, the collective perspective means that the girls' identities and experiences blur into one: "For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world…most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal." There is a certain timelessness to the novel; it was first published in 1983, so I presume it is set in the 1980s, but it could just as easily (except for a few details) be the 1950s or even the 1920s. Chase opens with a long, tender description of the kind of farmland that many of us would just cruise by on the highway and never appreciate: "In northern Ohio there is a county of some hundred thousand arable acres which breaks with the lake region flatland and begins to roll and climb, and to change into rural settings: roadside clusters of houses, small settlements that repose on the edge of nowhere, single lane bridges, backwater country stores with a single rusting gas pump..." Unsurprisingly, there are numerous strong female characters, not least Gram herself. "Here's to female solidarity. May it last forever," Uncle Neil sarcastically proclaims. My favorite of the women was probably Aunt Elinor, who has left her country upbringing behind and fully embraced New York City, getting her teeth straightened and adopting Christian Science. Yet there are also some terrific male characters. I found Uncle Dan the butcher particularly affecting, what with his quiet regret for the more exciting life he might have lived back in California, where he was stationed as a Marine; "counting the years, planning that one day he would take another job, would move, that his life would begin." Even his hobby, playing the trombone, seems like just another reminder of life's failures: "each time he played he got worse, instead of better, which he thought about summed up life anyway." Not too much happens in this novel; the main narrative driver is Aunt Grace's long battle with breast cancer. And yet the novel bears such a weight of sadness and universality that it resembles a Shakespearean tragedy. There are many strange moments where accidents leave characters looking dead, only for them to moments later spring back up with only minor injuries. Fragility and wanton aggression - especially domestic violence - are constantly at odds. "What did we ever have around here but dying and fighting?" Gram asks. Like Stoner, Chase's novel descends into a sort of muffled fatalism: her characters aren't raging against the dying of the light, just fumbling through the dimness as best they can, as the farm heads into its inevitable decline. "All's any of us can do is keep going, though there ain't no sense to it," Gram concludes. "I'm going to the picture show." If I could change one thing about this novel, it would surely be the title. It's an interesting one, but misleading: I daresay most readers (including myself, before I reminded myself of the synopsis) would be expecting historical fiction set in the Middle East. The beautiful simplicity and rural setting of the novel reminded me very much of Marilynne Robinson's work (especially Housekeeping, which also won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, two years before), and it might have fared better in the intervening decades if it had one of Robinson's plain, one-word titles: "Cousins" might do, or perhaps "Kinship." (Barring that, maybe "Krauss Drive.") There's a surprising dearth of information about Joan Chase online, though Ohioana Authors has some helpful pages. She published two books after this one, another novel (The Evening Wolves) in 1989 and a story collection (Bonneville Blue) in 1991, but seems to have largely disappeared off the literary map - that is, until now, I hope.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-10 00:00:00 Richard Mcaskill This book is written in first person plural, from the point of view of 4 cousins, 2 sets of sisters who are very close in age. They are telling the story of their family, as they see it, and from family stories handed down from Gram and her five daughters. At any given time any one of the daughters may be living in Gram's huge house with 9 bedrooms, set on lots of land also owned by Gram. If this sounds like a nice family saga, think again. Gram is a crusty old woman who cusses like a sailor, hates and resents her husband of 50 years (with some reason), wishes her kids and grandkids would all just leave her alone, and goes out every night to play bingo and bet on the horses. I liked her a lot. She had spirit. The five sisters are very close, as are the four cousins. It is very much a matriarchal society, and the men in their lives either have to give up and give in, or go away. Gram did give birth to two sons, but they died right away, so they never had to be considered. The young girls have the freedom of the huge farm they live on, the nearby small town, and the relative safety of the 1950's. Through their eyes and ears we learn about the secrets and resentments, loves and lives, and whys and wherefores of Gram and her daughters. I absolutely loved this book. I have seen it on all sorts of "must read" lists, and looked for it a long time before finally finding a mass market paperback copy at a used book sale. It was considered one of the best books published in 1983, but has been largely overlooked since then. And it was a first novel. I understand that NYRB has recently brought it back into print. Good for them. The writing is superb, the characters wonderful, (well, the women anyway), and the unusual narration of the cousins makes you feel like a fly on the wall of a big house with a lot of living going on inside.