April 27, 2015
Reader Zeller provides a heartfelt reading of Van den Berg’s dark yet inspiring apocalyptic novel. As a mysterious illness spreads across the world, 19-year-old protagonist Joy Jones is living as ward of the sinister Hospital, along with other immune children, subject to the strange experiments of Dr. Bek, whose interest in Joy extends beyond medical inquiry. Zeller’s modulations in tone and pace conjure up the emotional starkness of Joy’s world and her roller coaster of emotions. The lightness in Zeller’s voice conveys Joy’s youthful optimism when she’s thinking of her mother and her happiness when she is with her beau, Louis. But when Joy is sad, lost, and heavy with her reality, Zeller’s tone drops and her pace becomes slow and thick like the cough syrup that Joy drinks to numb herself to her world. Zeller is careful not to overwork her narration and at times adopts an evenness in her voice that highlights Joy’s desperation and the ambiguity of what is and is not true in her sterile world. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.
September 22, 2014
The debut novel from van den Berg brings the lightly speculative touch to
real-world longing that characterizes her collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, but against an apocalyptic backdrop that, at first, feels all too familiar. As a mysterious illness spreads across the world, a 19-year-old orphan girl called Joy Jones is living as ward of the sinister Hospital, along with other immune children, subject to the strange experiments of Dr. Bek, whose interest in Joy extends beyond medical inquiry. Indeed, amid an “epidemic of forgetting,” Joy fights for her memories of life, and hopes to be somehow reunited with her mother, whom she believes to be a nautical detective, a finder of lost ships, operating off the coast of Florida. Hoping to escape the fate of the Hospital’s other residents and nurtured by rumors of the outside world, Joy journeys from Kansas City to Florida, chasing visions alongside her only companion, a boy in a rubber mask named Marcus. This post-Hospital half of the novel plays to van den Berg’s strengths, with wild excursions into dangerous new environments populated by memorable oddballs, never losing sight of the emotional core of Joy’s quest. The earlier chapters are hampered by future-isms that are cliché and conclusions that feel tedious or foregone—but in Joy, van den Berg has created a voice that never feels false, only lost and dreaming of being found.