Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2015 March 27 • Friday

Grace McCleen’s The Land of Decoration did not immediately grab me. First of all, I’m beyond tired of books that begin with quotations from other books. This has passed beyond pretension into triteness at this point. This book begins with a quote from the bible, one that explains the title. The title is itself explained in the book itself, so this addition is superfluous. Not a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that will delay the drawing in of the reader if I am the reader.

The first part of the book is called “God’s Instrument”, the first chapter “The Empty Room”. The first line is “In the beginning there was an empty room, a little bit of space, a little bit of light, a little bit of time”. The echoes of Genesis continue for a bit and gradually the scene is set: a squalid industrial town, a narrator who is the ten-year-old daughter of a single father who is a devout member of a Christian sect who dedicate their lives to preparing for imminent Armageddon.

If I hadn’t been waiting a while for the subway on a Sunday night, I might not have stuck with this book. But I’m glad that I did. The Land of Decoration shares DNA with Carrie, Welcome to the Dollhouse and Joan of Arcadia but tells its own story. It’s hard to know how to take the voice of our narrator, Judith. It’s a story told by a waif, who doesn’t know as much as we know and expresses things very simply, directly, mildly, naively. It’s another device I’m a bit sick of but McCleen keeps the momentum going and the pace more or less perfect.

Judith begins talking to God and performing miracles. Having made her own miniature world in her room, with the people and buildings crafted from rubbish, she finds that whatever she does in her fake world comes to pass in the real world. At first this seems like a great thing but it turns out to have unexpected and unpleasant consequences.

Slow subway service prompted me to start this book. Days later I was on the subway again and so caught up in it that I actually missed my stop!