Island People

by Coleman Dowell

In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, American, LGBT, Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction

309 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Born in Kentucky in 1925, Robert Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of 5 novels including One of the Children is Crying, Island People and Mrs October Was Here.

Coleman Dowell's short stories, as is much of his work, are difficult to contextualize, shatter prior conceptions of what fiction should encompass, and break away from previous fictive forms. Some of the stories include a rich, crafted Gothicism, others a compelling surrealism, and still others an expertly timed lyricism. Dowell's characters are multidimensional, sometimes moving through the stories at metafictional levels. They are always reacting to the alienation of self, attempting to understand flawed beauty, and desperately striving to focus on the numerous splintered fragments of their fractured lives. He died in 1985.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 5 out of 5]

there sits a lonely old man in a lonely old house, brooding his life away...

I live in nightmare. My primary activity is concealing that fact. I am less and less successful.

it is a house of many memories, many scenes. the scenes come and go and bleed into each other. is one scene connected to the other? it may have a different cast of characters, it may have characters that overlap. each room is its own story, its own era; yet it is all the same house.

A house is a copy of a brain, divided into chambers.

there sits a man at his typewriter, writing the story of his life, surrounded by walls of his own making. his past is sloughed off like so much dead skin, stories peeling away like old paint from an old wall, showing more paint below, more stories, memories cracking and flaking off. look closely at certain spots and you can see the layers of different colors that have been painted on this wall over the years, multiple colors once vibrant and now dull and faded, blending into each other. what was the original color? impossible to tell.

At the age of thirty-eight, Christopher Webster lived in his mind, that last refuge of the old or the sick.

there sits a man named Chris. he has divided himself. at one point Chris goes to a party and is repelled, he leaves immediately once he realizes he is the victim of mistaken identity and that he is surrounded by gargoyles; he leaves and picks up a hustler and begins a sad and rather sick relationship. at one point Chris goes to the same party and he is known by all, a guest as repulsive as all the other gargoyles; he leaves with his mistress and they continue their sad and rather sick relationship. Chris has many nemeses and they are all women. Chris has only a few enemies and they are each of them men. who is this man named Chris? even he doesn't know. all he knows is that he is lonely on his island. is Chris the island itself?

Fragments. Fragments: even to himself, that's what a man is.

there sits a genius in the center of a book. each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph is a revelation of what prose can do and how feelings and memories can be articulated in new ways, articulated or shaped, beaten or wooed into new shapes, transformed midway into something quite different from how it all began. and yet not so different at all. that piece of living wood is still there in that piece of dead furniture. but what if you want it changed, if you tire of wood and its many shapes? the solution: burn it to ashes. obliterate it; kill what is already dead. now it is something new! and so the genius in the center of this book shapes and reshapes and turns a life into furniture, pieces to be moved around in different rooms, depending on mood, depending on the level of sadness or anger or pain or shame that colors that mood. no matter, all of these moves... all of this furniture that will eventually find itself on the ash heap.

All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several personal, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of him, and this done after he is safely dead.

there sits a bitterness in the center of a man. where did that bitterness come from? is it mother's fault? father's? is the world to blame? is it the man himself?

He had not realized how much he had come to hate language and saw his hatred as too complex; surely his goal was to simplify.

there sits a reader, agog and aghast. Chris is so many things he despises. there sits a reader, full of empathy and admiration. Coleman Dowell is so many things he respects. there sits a reader, his names are Chris and Coleman Dowell and mark monday and Mark Molnar.

A man in his last days may be simultaneously in many places. All of life is compressed like a checkerboard so that he may step from light to dark square, from past to present (the future is now the past) with no effort to speak of.

there sits a writer, his name is Coleman Dowell. despondent over his career, he committed suicide in 1985.

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

He was an island of ruined men.

This is how a dream is read. This is how a nightmare is read. This is how echoes of the past are read. This is how loneliness, isolation, desire, depravation, desperation, sorrow, love, lust, hate, pain, pleasure are read. And here I thought that reading this book would be like a fun voyage to an Island. How wrong I was and how glad I am. I wanted to shout, I wanted to type this whole review in uppercase just to put across my point in case anyone misses it that I LOVED THIS BOOK. This despite of the fact that almost 70-80% of it went over my head and I’m not to blame. It’s the kind of novel that should have the Annotated Island People, a Coleman Dowell Wiki and since we’re on it, Understanding Coleman Dowell won’t harm either. But it’s just a wishful fancy on my part as a result of my overenthusiastic reaction to this...Masterpiece.

I was immensely disappointed when I read these words on the Dalkey edition cover: The kind of Novel that can change a Reader’s Life. Really? Of all the encomiums this book had in its kitty, why the publishers went for something so banal and commercial (?), I asked myself and the book answered. I won’t say my life is changed per se but as a reader, some changes can be acknowledged without sounding melodramatic. In a broader sense, many books do that but there are few who does that with a big bang boom. (Yes, I loved this book)

The first part is called ‘THE GAME’ and that’s how the whole novel can be perceived. A complicated game where many players are coming and going, losing and winning but an appropriate end is not within sight. I haven’t experienced a more perfect, perfectly complex and an almost indecipherable display of meta-fiction before reading Island People. A series of narrative fragments and journal entries written by ‘I’ (masculine) and further carried on by Beatrix (feminine) but simple structure doesn’t satisfy our crazy postmodernists so, there is again a masculine (Chris) who’ll break down into many other personae. And there is a Bitch (Miss Gold). So we get stories written about writing stories where temporal shifts shift not only between few days or few nights but the whole centuries. And what do we get in return by dealing with so many complications? Brilliant writing, a perfect prose and a palpable experience of all the damned feelings of the universe.

Nowhere in his new life was there a thought or wish for another person. Sex was a closed fist, conversation was in books or in his head, invented or recalled; in either case, an improvement over the real thing. If he had only substituted one kind of emptiness for another, there was no one in his present life to know. A shallow man, alone, may gain a distant reputation for depth.

Dowell knew what he was doing and he doesn’t abandon his readers at all. There are many generous hints thrown where he clearly explains how to ‘get’ certain things in order to make ‘connections’. But one needs to stick to it. In order to view the whole thing as a ‘novel’ it’s important to tread the path at least till 250 pages and before you’ll know it, the end would already be there but the confusion, most probably, would persist so one got to re-read the book.

How can I convey for some future brain the impressions of this room, now, and make that brain sense the complexity of this particularly confusion?

There are many themes that are being explored throughout, namely homosexuality, racism, religion, child abuse; impact of past on present and most importantly, No Man should be an Island. Dowell said that had this book received better reception, he was going to write another book, ‘People of the Peninsula.’ But neither happened. He wanted an audience, he didn’t get them. He knew he was good and he is damn good so read the book.

Some of my favorite quotes:

He had thought of some of these things at the moment they were suggested or at the moment they were occurring, but once in his car he seemed to be encased in the circle of a dream both present and deferred. He was free of plots.

He thought of the coarseness of life, good fibers holding you together no matter what color they were, that kept you from falling apart in the face of death and silence.

He drew on the cigarette, loathing its staleness, and expelled a cloud of flat smoke before he again looked at other’s face, finding deep shadow in which two hazy luminosities seemed no more committal nor benevolent than a moon divided into twins by capriciously unfocused binoculars.

A link to Coleman Dowell’s interview:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa...

Christopher Sorrentino on Island People:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa...

Garima on Island People:

There is possibility that on a random booze session, Gilbert Sorrentino might have said to Coleman dowell,"Damn You, Cole! I wish I had written Island People."

Five/5 Stars

I live in nightmare. My primary activity is concealing that fact. I am less and less successful.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, Island People surprised me as being so vacuous… There are plenty of nobby wordings but the narration is so prolix and it just rings hollow…

Woke in the night, went outside as though drawn by fine wire. The stars were astounding. One understood “stellar,” and its misapplication to show-biz types, seedy comedians, brassy girls, made one mourn for the death of the word. The populous western sky! Great masses of constellations, myths, fables – a great literary sky-city.

Everything is so stilted… The stories the protagonist writes have no characters but just some ambiguous shadows of characters for he is outright narcissistic…

Here is the child grown up and old. Sterile. Is there a deeper silence than that? Old, lustful, sterile, alone. Praying. Praying to be rid of his cock. Can we offer you more than that for your liberation?

Everybody is a centre of one’s own universe but if one turns into Narcissus, the universe disappears…

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

A macabre house of chambers, resembling eachother in minute echo but with an incomplete system of connecting doors. Each room leads to another, but no blueprint can contain all of them, at least not within any single architectural reality.

As a complex novel of stories and fragments, this works exceedingly well. Each story is functionally self-contained and effective, but the novel that encompasses (dissects, transmutes) them is far more than their sum, unsettling and provocative and tragic. As a late voice from the past intones:

All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds.

This then, may be Dowell's attempted reconstruction of whatever self fragments he can gather, falsified in their particular details but true in resonance. His "first person biography", in denial of the implied truth and self-mastery implied by "autobiography." And it is a masterpiece, an inextricably layered fascination.

...

Premature assessment of the first 60 pages, which holds. The book relaxes a bit from there, but then uses the breathing room to expose a few virtuosic centerpieces, and then re-coils (recoils) all the more:

This is brilliant. Thanks Jeff J for adding this as I'd certainly not have heard of it otherwise, this densely resonant, complexly and ambiguously structured marvel of 70s high-post-modernity and gothic secluded-island whispers. I'm only 60 pages in but my head is swimming, and this has all the markings of a new favorite.

In other words, which we always seem to need, I would no more put my own experience into a story than I would into a conversation. The difference is that in writing I draw on the emotional side of experience and distort facts; whereas in conversation I include obvious facts and distort everything else, especially emotions.

Premise: after the failure of a play, a middle-aged(?) writer retreats from the New York art world to an old house on a secluded island, there entertaining (sparring with) society houseguests, writing stories, feeding his journal. Which sounds totally boring but is anything but. In part due to:

Style: mesmerizing. Dowell works his images with a perfect finesse, strikingly characterizing and deftly spinning almost-surreal details of weather and scenery. The economy makes it extremely dense, but not hard to read. And not hard to read again, picking apart the nuances. Plus, some slippery shifts suggest new directions opening up further

Voice: Things get really tricky here. I thought I needed to write about this first, about our assumed single generative viewpoint for the text, but I think I need to go first to:

Structure: Our nameless narrator speaks directly from journal entries, but also in a more veiled fashion in his uncertainly autobiographical short stories, which he then dissects in further journal entries. But he dissects some of the truth and falsity of the journal, as well, in other entries. Truth is not necessarily top-down here, but it seems to show in the cracks. Of course, there's a novel(?) being written within, but the structure of that book is elucidated within and seems to encompass journals, third-person narrative, and other things which may or may not be some of the less certain parts also happening in the larger narrative, assuming there is a larger narrative and not just a kind of collapsing mis-en-abime.

Voice: varies fluidly to suit the needs of the parts (though always dense and erudite), and seems to offer clues to deciphering the structure, except that it holds plenty of its own complications. In the first story, written first-person in the same voice / assumed character as the journal entries, we find a house guest named Beatrix, who like Dante's is the stuff of obsession. In the story, she may or may not be subject to a possession. Outside that self-contained episode, the narrator's obsession with her persists into possession: he critiques later writing as her words through him, inventing a kind of dialogue between them.

Observation: Watching the micro-interactions and conversational nuances of these people makes me realize that I am probably the most boring, the most unobservant conversationalist in the world. Of course, conversatioin here isn't necessarily the same as what I experience as such:

The point of verbal communication, as I see it, may be to explore the possibilities of insincerity in oneself and others. This has a deadly serious — no quotes this time — purpose for me: the game of divining how one uses insincerity to cover what.

Early conclusion: amazing.

[knig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult (but rewarding) going: Dowell demands, more than any other author I’ve read, full and unwavering mental engagement. Here is a description of a guest at a dinner party:


In a crowd of silent listeners she resembles an outcopping in the sea (birth trauma long forgot) composed of those virtues of speech which hold in themselves a kind of enthrallment. But she also occupies herself, sprawling across her own broad base, like a degenerate siren. When one by one thralls are broken[....]looking back we could hope for a Parthenopean response,but she is both enchanter and rock, and perhaps the feat of diving away from herself is complex.....

So. Not exactly a pusillanimous description: in fact, heavy with embellishment, loquacious even. But what, dear god, am I to make of this woman? Pared back to basics: is she a goody or a baddie? To be admired or pitied? An example of success or failure? Who and what is she? And, because there is a distinct lack of a ready-made meal here, my subconscious has to strain, and parse, and compartmentalise, apply and discard patterns so I can appropriate her in my lexicon, attribute meaning and order her into the compliance: I am playing with silly putty here. A few pages of this and my id, ego and superego are a tandem of rebellion: Basta! Overload.

Put the book down. Pick it up. This rhythm becomes a Spartan exercise of mind over matter: a Borg (and maybe Borgia-?)-esque promise that Dowell will be assimilated: resistance is futile.

Lets talk about sex (note to self. Switch off radio. Under no circumstances add the word ‘baby’ to preceding sentence. Even though Dowell might have liked it. You’ll see what I mean later). Well, there isn’t any. Yet the novel is redolent of it. The section ‘Victor’ is the most breathtaking, atmospherically hewn, electrifying rendition of need I have ever, ever, come across: the most gross pathological implosion of desire, self hatred, denial and frustrated, arrested completion I have ever come across, tempered with unmitigated rawness and Sisyphean despair. A lament for the eternally unspent. No release, ever.

People, then. These feature ominously conspicuous in an opus determined to exorcise people in a quest for redemption. People are parasitic, a partouze of convention and excess. Yet, behold. Is there any other writer out there who is more attune, more susceptible, more cognizant of people? Dowell is one of life’s great observers: a minute gesture, a downcast glance, a faint flick of the wrist: all these become signifiers: portents of great import and layers of meaning. A collage of mannerisms that sail between the Scylla of constancy and the Charybdis of subjectivity.

But now, real life. Always, this has to intrude on my platitude: why do I allow it. I should have closed the book and genuflected, not googled.

See, there is a dog in this book. More than any human, this dog , Miss Gold, is pedestaled. Dowell (aka Chris) loves the dog. Hell, I love the dog. What, What, what...(that is apparently what Dowell said every other sentence in real life, to, um, emphasize). Well, this, this, this: in as much as this novel is very autobiographical, Dowell did in fact have a beloved dashund dog. Here is how he loved her: he would beat her almost to death and revive her with tenderly administrations. Fuck.

And Victor? The eponymous Victor who made me crave smelling salts because the scene was THAT good? All balderdash and poppycock. Here is the reality: Dowell lived with a man who supported him so he could sit around all day and be , ah, artistic. When partner went to work in the morning, Dowell would pop on down to Central Park and pick up the most down and out , degenerate man (of ethnic minority) whom he could find, and ferry him back up in the apartment. And, not to discuss the birds and bees, neither. It was apparently all go,go, go. Just so long as they were uneducated, rough trade.

God, I wish I hadn’t read that about him. I should have just stayed with ‘Victor’.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A review is following me and threatening to catchup. I fear the worst.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Island People is the kind of telescoping, serrated novel that contains sentences and characters that are out to cut you. Each self contained section of the book seeks out the other parts in a yawing stretch of loneliness; the insular habitués and Doleman's dynamite writing produce a hypnotic cadence that causes the reader to place the chapters into a mind-map archipelago in order to just hold on for another page. It's brilliant. I'm not entirely sure where this all was intended to end up, but I'm still sitting here waiting for Charon to come pick me up and take me there.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite having nearly every major quality I vaunt in a novel--complex ramifications, playful experimental structure, arch prose, profligate vocabulary, wide-ranging erudition--something ultimately kept this work from fulfilling what I deemed to be its potential. It is certainly probable that the fault lies in me rather than in the book, so to be clear, if you've even heard of this book, do not neglect to read it. The worst I can say is that it is a laborious, demanding, disappointing near-masterpiece. Oftentimes the prose veers from eloquent to turgid in the same sentence, but there are so many stylistic shifts it is impossible to tell when "the author" is mocking or mimicking. One gets the sense that the book as product preserves the immense conflicts and tensions of its process and that things simply reached an insoluble point of exasperation. There is a pervasive somberness in the text, perhaps corollary to life and literature slipping into failure and fragmentation. It's not too far-fetched to imagine it as something like an unfinished pastiche of Mulligan Stew abandoned by Nabokov and reconstructed by John Hawkes; in other words, another undeserved gift from Dalkey Archive ungraciously received. I have little doubt that it would reward a more patient and studious reading--maybe yours.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

a strung together series of short stories a novel makes, this time. the best book ever. in death-defying sentences and in a tremendous organic and complex structure, this book is an autobiography of the best kind, made completely of true lies, which rewards you with basic insights into the human condish, a now deceased nyc artworld, and one spectacular case-history of schizophrenia.

[Mel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to give up on things but I just can't get into this. So it is going on the ditched pile.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful and sad book. Knowing that Coleman Dowell committed suicide makes the book more heartbreaking. The section with Christopher and Victor is exquisite. And a gorgeous piece of queer fiction. Reading this in 1976 (original release year) would have been awesome. Can’t wait to read more of him.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I was reading Coleman Dowell's first novel, One Of The Children Is Crying, I kept getting this line from a Mountain Goats’ song stuck in my head:

People say friends don’t destroy one another, what do they know about friends?

Which, I felt was thematically appropriate for that work, but just not specifically appropriate (as almost the entirety of One Of The Children Is Crying is about how families destroy one another). Well, hell, it looks like I get to reference the quote after all though, as Island People still takes the same view of interpersonal relationships – which I’ll discuss a bit more a bit further on – but applies it to friends and lovers instead of family.

I’m pretty big on not spoiling books, but there are going to be some minor structural spoilers in the below. I don’t think they’ll make any difference to the enjoyment you would have of the book – or lessen the sheer impact of the book itself – but I will say that part of the joy of the book is kind of being dumbfounded by how audacious the whole thing is, so if you like going into stuff blind I’d just ignore this review for now. But, again, the spoilers are super minor, and I’m probably just being overly fussy about the whole thing.

So, this book is kind of crazy in its structure. And, truthfully, it only becomes apparent how crazy it is the further along you get into the novel. The book begins with our unnamed narrator being visited by two friends (acquaintances?) at his island home. But, as soon as the visit is concluded, you actually realize that the visit was a short story, created by the writer-as-protagonist (whose name might be Chris). Here’s the thing about it though, the short story still comes off as very autobiographical – the location, the dog, the narrator’s keeping of a journal – even after you realize that the visit was, in fact, fiction.

From there the book kind of cycles through narrations – apparently-autobiographical short stories written by our writer-as-protagonist (referred to as W-A-P from now on, as I don’t want to keep writing it out), journal entries by our W-A-P, brief third person narratives (which are probably written by our W-A-P while under a state of possession), along with historic narratives.

Throughout the book, though, the “autobiographical” nature of all of the short stories in the book is called into question. That is because something happens through the creation of that first story, which the W-A-P begins to reference as a certain haunting – a haunting of the writing itself, as well as an actual haunting; these in fact being two separate hauntings – that begins to affect all of the writings of the W-A-P. What this does, in large part, is call into question the reliability of anything we’re being told throughout the book. Not only does the haunting of the writing affect the short stories presented, but the journals themselves – as acts of writing – are incredibly suspect, and even the W-A-P brings their unreliability to light. There is a question throughout – fairly obviously – around if the W-A-P is in fact haunted, or if the isolation of his island living has caused his psyche to fracture and manifest as hauntings in his writing and thoughts.

Then, as the book progresses, the journals begin to inform the short stories, which then provide commentary on the journals. An example: There is a section of the “journal” that describes a visit to the island of a woman called Else; the visit itself is unwelcome (Else stays at another couple’s home on the island), and the W-A-P remarks in his journal that she has arranges the visit “to be near” him. After that visit, there is a short story where an unnamed protagonist leaves the island to visit his lover, Else, who keeps an apartment “to be near” him – again, the proximity is intimated to be unwelcome. Through the visit you discover that the unnamed protagonist is a writer (Else owns a small publishing house) who has written a book. In the book, he has created a character, Chris, who he has based on Else, and the book focuses on Chris’s two year period of madness.

The madness and fracturing escalates as the book progresses – there is an amazing short towards the end (The Surgeon) that is fucking wonderfully over the top – until the entire book itself, all assumptions and truths and assertions, basically crashes in on itself in a miasma of unreliability.

Which is, of course, excellent.

So, putting the structure aside, the other thing that stands out about this book – other than just the writing itself the writing itself is so damn good you don’t even know is Coleman’s descriptions of the relationships between every single character in the book (and, as referenced above, the same is true of One Of The Children Is Crying). Coleman has this persistent ability to isolate and highlight the mines and tripwires that litter everyday conversations; the frailty and fragility of the ties the bind us all together; and the intertwined loving and loathing and hating that underlies almost all human relationships. This sounds misanthropic; which, amazingly enough, is far from the truth: in fact, Coleman Dowell seems to have this overwhelming love and compassion for every character he writes. That said, there is a line in the book that seems to sum up what it is that he sees in all of us, that either comes to the forefront of all our relationships or simmers just under the surface:

He gazed into her unclothed eyes that were devoid of that illusion of distance which civilized people are able to set between each other to keep the brute at bay

Whether his characters have, or are devoid, of this illusion of distance, Coleman is always at work highlighting the hostility and instability of all of our interactions. There is a great deal of pent-up hurt and anguish in all of the characters of this book – but twisted into that is the characters’ overwhelming needs; and the pain and desires are in constant conflict – these characters have been hurt so badly as to no longer be able to willingly communicate their needs in the face of the persistent fear of greater hurt, but the needs remain, and their continual lack of fulfillment underlies and informs the malice and hostility present throughout the book.

It’s thrilling and amazing stuff.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first chapter tricks you into thinking this is a very fun gothic melodrama when in actuality it is beyond tedious and hard to get through! The book is structured into three different kinds of chapters: journal entries from the narrator Chris, a writer isolating himself on an island and obsessing over one of his characters to the point that her voice is drowning out his in his head; thinly-veiled autobiographical short stories written by Chris between journal entries; and absolutely bizarre flashbacks (?) to the life of a ghost (?) of a murderer (?) who lived in Chris' island home and is now haunting him (?). The question marks are because I truly did not know what was happening for most of this book and, considering that I really enjoy most experimental lit, I think that is Coleman's fault not my own!

It oscillates between being an interesting challenge—Chris is slowly losing his mind in isolation and his journals get more and more erratic and dissociative—and being just a tedious blur of words that I forced myself to trudge through even though I really was not having a good time. The highlights were always the short story chapters, mainly because they contain the most clear, unpretentious writing in the book, but as it goes on even those become kind of a chore as the stories feel kinda bloated and boring. Between this and Life: A User's Manual last year, it seems like the books I hype myself up the most to read are the ones that let me down the most. :•(

[Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking of this as I write. Reminiscent of Kolyma Tales: "the human mind is fragile". I'm just trying to crawl out of a similar pit. People have become strange to me, and I have become strange to them. I find myself saying aloud to myself "Coleman Fucking Dowell". Prose is, as I've remarked before, similar to that of Justine, though more hip/cool. At least the only revulsion I've ever given into has been directed toward myself, and even that has been at some remove, or perhaps that's worse...

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an ambitious undertaking. It works. It does. Just not for me.

Much as I love a splintered psyche, none of voices here resonated with me and the collective doesn’t seem to arrive at any universal truth or question worth pondering. It feels heavy, labored...beautiful. I just think it’s been done better, before and since.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor.

[Tim Mcleod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dowell's prose is incredibly dense, but in a delicious way where you have to put the book down to unpack and savor what you've just read. I did have trouble through the 70-80% mark fitting in what exactly was going on; whether it was my own mental failing, lack of attention span, or fault of the author I can't say.
Island People is definitely worthy of a diagram or two. I disagree however with some of the descriptions of the text being about "a descent into madness/ look into schizophrenia" etc. That's overly simplistic, a way of putting a fence around the words to explain it easily.
Though it may seem a threadbare topic now, I think the work is a postmodern exploration into identity and how another's personality is created by the viewer/reader (feel free to groan and roll your eyes here). Sometimes it's damn funny and others loathsome. Excellent.

[Jeff Russo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably a 4.5 star; I'm trying to be less miserly with the five star rating. I'm glad I read this on airplane flights, where I could read slowly, without electronic distractions. A little bit of a shame Dowell didn't get to writing novels earlier, the talent pops right off the page, such a great grasp of both the language and the nooks + crannies of the six inches between the ears.

At times I was reminded a bit The Blood Oranges while reading, so I was not surprised at all to read afterwards that John Hawkes was in the Dowell admirer club.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obtuse, erudite, and sad as hell. A loose novel (of stories and journal entries) that orbits in McElroy's realm of (in)accessibility. Chris, a lonely gay man, runs a guest house on an island off NYC. The guests, his past, his loneliness. and ghosts all bleed into the book as he details his decline. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happens. Powerful nonetheless.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

My god the first 50-60 pages (all I've read thus far) are absolutely mesmerizing.

[Erik F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sinister and skillful exploration of fractured identity and the writing process itself. Impressive yet underappreciated — recommended for cerebral and adventurous readers everywhere.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

From p.287:

"ALL THERE IS, IS FRAGMENTS, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of him, and this done after he is safely dead. To know him slightly, for to know him well is not vouchsafed even God, who has receded, aeon by aeon, propelled by the shocks of astoundment and mea culpa, at what he has wrought."

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Might come back to this eventually but right now I cannot read this I'm so very sorry to this man.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't have a clue what was going on most of the time. It's a pretty tough read. Others may like it more but it was too much for me.