THE JOY DIVISIONS, Scott Dimovitz’s debut novel, is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic journey through the waning years of the twentieth century, weaving together art, religion, labor history, and apocalyptic visions into a dense, dizzying tapestry. Dimovitz’s tale careens through time and space, from the goth-punk clubs of 1990 Philadelphia to the crumbling factories of 1992 Allentown to the ancient spires of 2003 Oxford, all propelled by the disaffected driftings of Ed Pullman, a sensitive young searcher trapped in a world of alienation and diminishing possibilities. Still reeling from his mother’s death and unmoored by the implosion of his artistic dreams, Ed ricochets between a yearning for meaning and a suspicion that meaning itself might be a cosmic joke. His romance with Eva, a glamorous trans woman, feels poignantly real, as does his incestuous passion for Ester, a relationship that taps into the novel’s deepest Oedipal undercurrents.
The novel’s title evokes the iconic post-punk band Joy Division, which emerged from the bleak industrial landscape of Manchester, England, in the late 1970s. Like Manchester, which suffered massive deindustrialization, economic decline, and cultural upheaval in the postwar twentieth century, Allentown serves as a microcosm of the socioeconomic forces that have transformed once-thriving communities into landscapes of abandoned factories, fractured families, and lost dreams. And just as Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself in 1980 on the eve of the band’s first American tour, Ed navigates a terrain of disillusionment and despair, his personal struggles to find meaning and connection a reflection of a broader societal malaise.
At the core of the novel’s philosophical vortex is Tod Griffon, a slippery, messianic figure whose syncretic ramblings weave together Eastern mysticism, Gnostic heresies, and self-help aphorisms into an intoxicating gospel. Tod’s Kinfolk collective blurs the line between a hippie commune and a doomsday cult, and the ill-fated “happening” they stage in an abandoned factory feels like a Dionysian bacchanal teetering on the edge of oblivion. As a fictional creation, Tod walks a tightrope between sincerity and charlatanry, at once ridiculous and genuinely unnerving.
Dimovitz captures the sonic and visual textures of 1990s alternative culture with a pop culture obsessive’s eye for detail, with period-perfect references from Morrissey to Twin Peaks. “Love, love will tear us apart…again,” mopes Ian Curtis as Ed enters a goth boutique, where “Doc Martens and dog collars; bondage bracelets with locks and latches; leather jackets and pleather pants, patched with studs, spikes, and buckles” sit alongside Charles Manson T-shirts. Dimovitz conjures the textures and temperatures of his settings—the “sweetly pungent odor of oil paints and varnish” in a loft, the “gentle pulsing” of “woodblade ceiling fans” in a boho coffee shop—with painterly precision.
Stylistically, THE JOY DIVISIONS resembles a literary remix, blending influences as enormous as James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace into a heady postmodern concoction, dense with allusions and digressions. But despite the eye-popping prose, the novel occasionally loses focus and urgency. Some storylines, like Ed’s romance with Eva, remain underdeveloped. Others, like Philos’s Pynchonesque backstory, don’t quite integrate with the main narrative. Supporting characters drift in and out while protagonist Ed, despite his Odyssean journey, remains somewhat opaque.
The specter of Allentown’s deindustrialization hovers over the narrative, a slow-motion apocalypse that mirrors the characters’ inner desolation. In one bravura set piece, the Hess department store collapses into a massive sinkhole during a lavish corporate gala, a disaster that reads as a metaphor for the crumbling façade of American prosperity. These social and economic forces lend THE JOY DIVISIONS a surprising weight and relevance, grounding its metaphysical flights in the gritty specifics of time and place.
THE JOY DIVISIONS is a riotous, poignant, vividly imagined tale of a generation grappling with irony, alienation, and the search for connection at the edge of a new millennium. “History is everywhere,” Philos observes. “Most people just never notice it until it is too late.” In Dimovitz’s telling, we are all “the function of a world and a time chosen for us,” our identities constructed from the detritus of pop culture and politics. With humor and heart, THE JOY DIVISIONS faces this truth and finds fleeting grace in chaos.
THE JOY DIVISIONS, Scott Dimovitz’s darkly funny, epic debut conjures the goth-industrial ’90s with period-precise wit and Pynchonesque sprawl.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader
