Dan

Melba Zuzzo, erstwhile innocent of the male-heavy hamlet of Dan, a town located in the foothills of . . . somewhere? . . . finds herself in a rut. In fact she was probably born into this rut, but today, for some reason, she feels suddenly aware of it. Everything is changing, yet nothing's making sense. The people she might rely upon, the habits she should find comforting--everything is off. It's as if life, which has gone by largely unnoticed up to now, has been silently conspiring against her the whole time.

In Dan, Joanna Ruocco has created a slapstick parable that brings together the restless undercurrents and unabashed campiness of Thomas Pynchon with the meandering imaginative audacity of Raymond Roussel. Either Dan is a state of mind, beyond the reach of any physical map, or else it sits on every map unnoticed, tucked beneath the big red dot that tells us YOU ARE HERE.

"A young woman becomes increasingly aware of authority--and the urge to push back against it--in this linguistically free-wheeling and challenging novel. Ruocco doesn't engage in wordplay so much as she performs a gut rehab on vocabulary, reshaping the meanings of words and testing new resonances within a familiar narrative structure . . . Modernist-style experimentation ain't dead yet. Giddy, intriguing stuff from a writer eager to let words misbehave."--Kirkus Reviews