I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
“None of us chooses the life we discover we’re leading. That’s our tragedy and our challenge,” (Dimovitz 157).
After his mother dies, Ed Pullman, art-school dropout, aimlessly wanders Allentown, Pennsylvania looking for purpose. With his loving cousin Ester offering comfort, guidance, and introduction to her ex-boyfriend’s, Tod Griffon, cult, Ed tries to make sense of it all. Making connections with a trans singer, Neo-Nazi’s, goth kids, and a Jewish travel writer, Ed becomes immersed in a variety of subcultures that may just help him find his place in the world.
I didn’t really know what to expect from The Joy Divisions when I started it. It’s not that the summary of the novel is inaccurate or vague, only that there’s a lot of moving parts to this story and trying to summarize it all into an easy to digest paragraph is a nearly impossible task. While Ed and Ester are the characters most closely followed throughout the book, readers get glimpses into a variety of other character’s lives. We learn about their backgrounds, their lives, what brought them to Allentown, Pennsylvania and how they’re all trying to find and understand themselves.
Ed is an interesting, though pretentious at times, protagonist to follow but I adored Ester. I thought her journey throughout the novel was so interesting and I was a bit disappointed in how her storyline ended with no resolution. After a brilliant first-person confession scene Ester is vaguely referenced but not seen again for the remainder of the novel which was a shame. I also enjoyed the theology and philosophy of Philos and the glimpse Dimovitz gives readers into the large cast of characters in his novel. I didn’t fully understand the shift from third to first person at times, and when that occurred it was confusing trying to figure out who was speaking when no labelling is given at the beginning of the chapter, but I appreciated the experiment of it.
When people experience loss they look for meaning, salvation, comfort in a variety of sources. Sometimes this meaning is found in another person, sometimes it’s found through religion and faith. Sometimes it’s through a hobby or art, a radical belief. When people experience loss they look for purpose, and that is at the heart of Dimovitz’s novel. Ed, Ester, and the rest of the cast of characters are looking for purpose, and they find their purposes in a various ways, some of it healthy, some of it not. But that’s the point, The Joy Divisions is about young people finding purpose, finding themselves, and trying to understand the quickly changing world around them.
The Joy Divisions is part coming-of-age, part-philosophy, part-glimpse at a very different way of life before the world became what it is now. Dimovitz does an excellent job pulling readers in to this moment of time through his novel that I know many readers will appreciate.
Publication: November 15 2023
Publisher: Tailwind Press Enterprises LLC
Pages: 254 (PDF)
Source: Owned
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Historical Fiction
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:
The year is 1993, and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned home to work as a janitor in Allentown, Pennsylvania-the enigmatic nexus where goth kids, coffeeshop culture, and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis, the dying textiles industry, and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art, post-NAFTA labor battles, and burning factories, their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical, Scott Dimovitz’s grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.
Sarah O'Connor 