{"id":1360,"date":"2018-12-31T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1360"},"modified":"2018-12-31T16:52:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:52:00","slug":"desanders-hap-and-hazard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1360","title":{"rendered":"DeSanders, Hap and Hazard"},"content":{"rendered":"
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LITERARY FICTION<\/p>\n

Diane DeSanders<\/span><\/p>\n

Hap and Hazard and the End of the World: A Novel<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Bellevue Literary Press<\/p>\n

Paperback, 978-1-9426-5836-8 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $16.99<\/p>\n

January 9, 2018<\/p>\n

Dick and Jane are well off, living with their three daughters in late 1940s Dallas <\/span>when there were still cows and cotton fields out Preston Road. There are maids, cooks, yardmen, shopping at Neiman\u2019s, dining at the Adolphus, and garden parties where the women are \u201ctalking chummily yet guardedly together out on the patio with their beautiful clothes and their diamond-cut ankles, sleek birds circling, feathers out.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Dick returned injured and broken from World War II. He\u2019s in constant pain that mixes into an unstable compound with humiliation and frustration at his disfavored status at his father\u2019s car dealership, Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac, where he plays second to his brother. Dick explodes frequently and violently at \u201cintolerable imperfections,\u201d terrorizing his family, friends, pets, strangers, and inanimate objects.<\/p>\n

The story is told through the first-person narration of the oldest daughter, seven years old, an anxious, imaginative child, adrift, neglected and lonely, confused by the grown-ups whom she should be able to trust to protect her. \u201cIf only I could have a big brother or even a big sister,\u201d she laments, \u201csomeone older, or just someone\u2014I need someone\u2014who will tell me at least what it is that we are pretending.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hap and Hazard and the End of the World: A Novel<\/span> is Diane DeSanders\u2019s<\/span> first book. DeSanders is a fifth-generation Texan who inexplicably lives in Brooklyn, New York. Happily, her Texan bona fides are on ample display in this charming yet heart-wrenching debut about a single tumultuous, pivotal year in the life of a young girl.<\/p>\n

In Anna Karenina,<\/span> Leo Tolstoy <\/span>wrote, \u201cHappy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\u201d The author\u2019s choice of Dick and Jane for the parents\u2019 names tells us that this unhappy family is not unusual, is in fact typical in the fact of their unhappiness, but the details are important, as is the fact that the child narrator remains nameless.<\/p>\n

She relates vignettes representative of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this coming-of-age year, full of pathos in the partial understanding and magical thinking of a child. She desperately wants to believe, to have faith, in all sorts of things\u2014God, Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, the adults she must depend upon\u2014but her inquisitive mind demands proof. \u201cI think some stories are real and some are not,\u201d she thinks, \u201cbut grown-ups do not seem to want to tell you which are which.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeSanders\u2019s word choices are precise, her style fluid, her imagery frequently delightful, as when Aunt Celeste shuffles cards for bridge, \u201cher fingers dancers, the cards acrobats.\u201d\u00a0 The child who narrates her world is sometimes daydreaming, sometimes caught in the rain (\u201cI run out, climb the slippery wooden fence, run, slip on wet grass, fall down, get up, run, run, run\u201d). She negotiates high-stakes playground politics (\u201ca contest as vicious as that in any chicken yard\u201d). Other times she\u2019s sweetly comic: \u201cI\u2019d recently realized grown-ups don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing if they\u2019re not looking at you,\u201d she tells us. \u201cAlthough you have to watch out for the sides of their eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a romanticized version of childhood, though the conclusion is pitch-perfect. This is a girl discovering cause and effect, exploring boundaries, feeling for the shape of her life, like the bullfrog trapped in their backyard swimming pool, \u201cranging the shape and size of the pool, being the shape and size of the pool, forgetting that there was ever anything else but the shape and size of the pool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow much more they might accomplish if only they could talk to each other.\u201d DeSanders quotes Jane Goodall in an epigraph opposite her author\u2019s note. Goodall was talking about chimpanzees, but the sentiment is aptly chosen for DeSanders\u2019s characters, a nuclear family in perpetual danger of fission.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LITERARY FICTION Diane DeSanders Hap and Hazard and the End of the World: A Novel Bellevue Literary Press Paperback, 978-1-9426-5836-8 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $16.99 January 9, 2018 Dick and Jane are well off, living with their three daughters in late 1940s Dallas when there were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}