D. Foy’s MADE TO BREAK

Made to Break by D. Foy

 

This is a deeply great and strange book. I’ve now tried to write six different sentences to follow that first one, each attepting to saddle the horse of what constitutes strange writing and attempt a definition or something (I hate this, by the way: having an interview get you underwater this early; perhaps I’m just rusty). Maybe let’s start again:

D Foy‘s Made to Break is set in 1996 and features a group of friends vacationing through New Years at a cabin in Tahoe, but the weather turns terrible and they’re trapped in the cabin, and one of the friends (I keep writing griends) is hurt and is getting worse. Again: cabin in Tahoe, new years (meaning: fairly abandoned), and bad weather. Maybe the boilerplate for this is that, through the set-up, Foy creates a scenario through which his characters are forced to confront each other, and their past, and their addictions, and their everything (introduce a claustrophic can’t-get-out situation, and that’s the story: how do they get out?), and that’s certainly true, and Foy’s great in terms of psychological acuity, and he presents these maybe PG-13-level-messed-up folks well and clearly, and if you’re looking for characters to wonder and care about while reading, Made to Break‘s a good bet.

(re those characters and their PG-13 rating: I don’t know. They do significant quantities of drugs, and they’re certainly reckless, but they feel totally, totally of a piece of a certain time and social class. I graduated high school in ’97, so the folks in Made to Break are years older than I was then, but what they were doing was 100% recognizable as what young adults seemed then to be into and in. Maybe their goings-on are actually rated R, but I’d argue to the contrary.)

But the reason I’d much more push anyone to read this is Foy’s writing. Here’s one of the ways (I think) this book is weird, and it’s the very best way: let’s admit that we’re at a point of sort of flat-panned, affectless voices in fiction, in large part. That’s the going thrum, anyway, it seems to me. Certainly we’re not of a moment of deep purple explosiony stuff, where the lines fairly branch and branch and branch off, sizzling ecstatic and nonstop, Kerouacian and Hunter S Thompsonishly bent. Here’s what I mean (and no apologies for quoting at length: this stuff gets its gangbusters from accretion, so even this is not enough):

 

            I’d just come in from a long night of raves south of Market. My pal Bruno and I had hooked up with a pal of his, a shrimp of a cat named Andre. The kid was black as a raven, with a hoop through his septum and bleach his fro—a stripe front to back—and an Angel Flight suit, white, propped by a polyester shirt of midnight black, and gold enough round his neck to’ve drained Fort Knox. He was the slickest dealer I’d ever met.

            But before that even, Bruno and I had dropped a few tabs of X and hit the floor to mix it with the ladies. Three spicy Filipinas caught us gawking and slithered over post-haste, wriggles and tits and laughter. We zoomed in on two and left the third to share till someone else appeared. This went on for who-knows-how-long, ten or fifteen, or forty-five or fifty. What I can say for sure is how once Bruno’s chick befan to look better than mine, I weaseled my way between them. And by God if it wasn’t five minutes more that the girl had grown eight arms, a hand on my chest, a hand in my hair, another on my Jean Jeudi.

 

That’s page 112, by the way, and as flip-open-to-it respresentative as anything. It’s not just that the passage hews perfectly to the way experience feels (the dis- and interruptions and but before that even, the mimicry of speech [mix it with the ladies]), but the almost crunchy linguistics of certain phrases: black as a raven…hoop through his septum and bleach his fro. Where have you read anything like that recently? Maybe this is just my own dumb/dim fault for reading what I do but I’m reading very very little that’s got that sort of propulsion, that sort of swerve and excess. The thing reads electric paisley, almost, and I’ll here add that I don’t like this sort of writing. Ask me contextlessly while I’m trying to enjoy a turkey sandwich on a Tuesday and I’ll say fuck no, I don’t want purple, overdone prose. But this stuff of Foy’s sings just wild, just wild. I cared much, much more for the sentences than any of the characters, which isn’t to say the characters are bad at all, but more to say that Foy’s waving a motherfucker of a wand here, casting some something of a spell.

Anyway, that’s the big reason to jump up and down about this book: the shock of the new, or at least (I’d argue) the re-emergence of a style that’s been principally dormant for a good while. I don’t see how you could read this thing and not be propulsively charged right the hell up. Take or leave whatever else you want: you gotta get your eyes wet with this sort of sentencing. You really do.