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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 is 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.
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.
149 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2014
8 people are currently reading
448 people want to read
About the author
Joanna Ruocco
19 books33 followersJoanna Ruocco is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took” and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her most recent novel is Dan, published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project. She also serves as Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Wake Forest University.
Ruocco has also published romance novels under the pseudonyms Toni Jones and Alessandra Shahbaz.
(from Wikipedia)
Ruocco has also published romance novels under the pseudonyms Toni Jones and Alessandra Shahbaz.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
November 30, 2017
One for that peculiar literature of arbitrary and inescapable doom that I hadn't really grouped in my head until now: Aminadab, Frances Johnson, The Third Policeman. The narrative guides reader and protagonist towards despair by sequential underminings and denial of the pillars of one's day-to-day identity: family, mentor, work, home, self. It was difficult for me to make out the true contours of the novel until I neared the end -- only now in retrospect are all the silly names, words seemingly strung together for unexpected clashes of sound and tone, and nonsensical riffs of dialogue, at the time somewhat patience-trying, revealed as fully sinister, perhaps meaningful. As such, even as I write this, I feel a mounting sense of needing to revisit and reassess. Possibly from the start. I didn't really feel that I was enjoying this until after it was finished, but now I'm filled with mounting intrigue and appreciation.
October 21, 2014
Dan takes a long time to get going, I admit. It's entertaining enough for the first hundred pages or so, as Melba is accused by the various men of small town Dan, and in the process we learn a little bit about the place. But then, yowzers.
We turn out to be watching someone trying to piece together their consciousness as their self-consciousness falls to pieces. Melba is accused, among other things, of being or impersonating someone else, who may or may not have existed, but does have a grieving, insane husband. Her mother suggests that she's falling apart because she doesn't shop enough. If she shopped more, she'd have more things to build her personality with.
She would be able to hold herself more firmly in the flow of time; one of most remarkable passages in the book lightly parodies Benjamin's 'angel of history' (the school principal is Principal Benjamin, I'm not getting this from nowhere). Melba's mother tells her that, one day, Melba is "going to see something startling and not in a good way. You'll see a piece of straw driven like a skewer through a man's neck by gale force winds... you'll throw your arm across your eyes and those little hairs [on her arms] will act like Velcro on your eyeballs... that's the future, Melba. That's what not meaning gets you, eyeballs on your arm. Why won't you buy depilatory creams? They smell wonderful, like scorched lemons. They're cheap. You never shop, Melba. It's killing you, not just in the future, right now."
I admit, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing: theory-done-twee, irony with an emotional kick. I thought Ruocco might struggle to bring everything together at the end, but she succeeds perfectly, taking Melba back to her birth and the book, literally to its end. Dan turns out to be a kind of machine for making metaphors literally--including the idea, which I still find fascinating, that constructing a narrative in time, and constructing a self in history, have a lot in common. But most importantly, what could be a real snow-globe novel--self-enclosed, disturbing nothing outside itself--turns out to be constantly pointing at the world we actually have to live in.
We turn out to be watching someone trying to piece together their consciousness as their self-consciousness falls to pieces. Melba is accused, among other things, of being or impersonating someone else, who may or may not have existed, but does have a grieving, insane husband. Her mother suggests that she's falling apart because she doesn't shop enough. If she shopped more, she'd have more things to build her personality with.
She would be able to hold herself more firmly in the flow of time; one of most remarkable passages in the book lightly parodies Benjamin's 'angel of history' (the school principal is Principal Benjamin, I'm not getting this from nowhere). Melba's mother tells her that, one day, Melba is "going to see something startling and not in a good way. You'll see a piece of straw driven like a skewer through a man's neck by gale force winds... you'll throw your arm across your eyes and those little hairs [on her arms] will act like Velcro on your eyeballs... that's the future, Melba. That's what not meaning gets you, eyeballs on your arm. Why won't you buy depilatory creams? They smell wonderful, like scorched lemons. They're cheap. You never shop, Melba. It's killing you, not just in the future, right now."
I admit, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing: theory-done-twee, irony with an emotional kick. I thought Ruocco might struggle to bring everything together at the end, but she succeeds perfectly, taking Melba back to her birth and the book, literally to its end. Dan turns out to be a kind of machine for making metaphors literally--including the idea, which I still find fascinating, that constructing a narrative in time, and constructing a self in history, have a lot in common. But most importantly, what could be a real snow-globe novel--self-enclosed, disturbing nothing outside itself--turns out to be constantly pointing at the world we actually have to live in.
May 6, 2020
This book is either:
A) A paean to landlordship.
B) An absurdist fantasy pie-in-the-facing us with reverse-engineered normality.
C) A warning against doctors, school principals, bakeries, and attention from males.
D) Hard to capture in mere words.
Choose one. Choose them all. Even if you don't choose, you still have made a choice (at least, that's what Rush sings to me). But sometimes choices seem arbitrary. We suddenly find ourselves in a place (or a job or a relationship) and it's maybe not what we want. This is where earnest Melba Zuzzo finds herself in the bizarre town of Dan. And the title of this book actually serves as a great example of what Ruocco does with language throughout the book: disarms and disorients. Just say it aloud. I live in Dan. I'm from Dan. Dan is my home. It sounds ridiculous. Absurd. If it were Danville, Danity, Danburg, etc. it would sound like a place and not a person.
Melba is chastised by her mother, mansplained repeatedly by the almost exclusively male inhabitants of Dan, and eager to figure out her place in life. There's an almost menacing aspect to the oddity of this book, especially because so much of it is based on dialogue. The exchanges follow their own sort of logic and because of this you're never sure as a reader what to expect next or what it might mean.
It's not necessarily riveting so much as entertainingly confusing. You feel like something important is being revealed, but like Melba, you're not really sure what it is or what to do with it. Somewhat reminiscent of Donald Barthelme's short story writing, but with a perspective and style that is distinctly Ruocco's.
Let me put it this way, I once worked with a boss who would pretend you hadn't spoken if you asked a question she didn't like or couldn't answer. It would be just the two of you in her office face-to-face with conversation flowing. But if you asked that one unwanted question, she would stare you in the eye, blink occasionally, and say nothing. As if it never happened. As if she were just waiting for you to reply or change topics. It was uncanny. Somewhat unnerving. It was like a gesture had gaslighted you. Maybe you hadn't said anything. Maybe the whole thing had been imagined....
I got that same feeling from this book.
Existential dread inscribed into everydayness.
------------------------------
MEANINGS I SOUGHT OUT VIA THE WORLD WIDE WEB
termagant | eutrophic | mansard | occiput
------------------------------
From a Washington Square Review interview with Joanna Ruocco:
A) A paean to landlordship.
B) An absurdist fantasy pie-in-the-facing us with reverse-engineered normality.
C) A warning against doctors, school principals, bakeries, and attention from males.
D) Hard to capture in mere words.
Choose one. Choose them all. Even if you don't choose, you still have made a choice (at least, that's what Rush sings to me). But sometimes choices seem arbitrary. We suddenly find ourselves in a place (or a job or a relationship) and it's maybe not what we want. This is where earnest Melba Zuzzo finds herself in the bizarre town of Dan. And the title of this book actually serves as a great example of what Ruocco does with language throughout the book: disarms and disorients. Just say it aloud. I live in Dan. I'm from Dan. Dan is my home. It sounds ridiculous. Absurd. If it were Danville, Danity, Danburg, etc. it would sound like a place and not a person.
Melba is chastised by her mother, mansplained repeatedly by the almost exclusively male inhabitants of Dan, and eager to figure out her place in life. There's an almost menacing aspect to the oddity of this book, especially because so much of it is based on dialogue. The exchanges follow their own sort of logic and because of this you're never sure as a reader what to expect next or what it might mean.
It's not necessarily riveting so much as entertainingly confusing. You feel like something important is being revealed, but like Melba, you're not really sure what it is or what to do with it. Somewhat reminiscent of Donald Barthelme's short story writing, but with a perspective and style that is distinctly Ruocco's.
Let me put it this way, I once worked with a boss who would pretend you hadn't spoken if you asked a question she didn't like or couldn't answer. It would be just the two of you in her office face-to-face with conversation flowing. But if you asked that one unwanted question, she would stare you in the eye, blink occasionally, and say nothing. As if it never happened. As if she were just waiting for you to reply or change topics. It was uncanny. Somewhat unnerving. It was like a gesture had gaslighted you. Maybe you hadn't said anything. Maybe the whole thing had been imagined....
I got that same feeling from this book.
Existential dread inscribed into everydayness.
------------------------------
MEANINGS I SOUGHT OUT VIA THE WORLD WIDE WEB
termagant | eutrophic | mansard | occiput
------------------------------
From a Washington Square Review interview with Joanna Ruocco:
"Dan began as ekphrasis. My friend Dan has an uncle who owns a painting of unsurpassable wrongness known as the Finfer (because it’s signed “Finfer”). It’s recognizably a scene of small-town American life. You can see the cultural idiom. Good citizens. Main Street. But every element in the painting is actually unrecognizable. An anvil-headed figure—a boy in a baseball cap?—holds something—a stick? a liver? Canadian bacon?—for a creature that approaches on odd-numbered legs. The nostalgia menaces. I wanted to write something that matched the Finfer tonally and created a similar kind of place. I’m not a very visual thinker, so my translation of painting into language was more about mood than description. There’s something silly and also scary about the Finfer, and I hope about Dan too. The main character, Melba Zuzzo, works in a bakery, so maybe I just can’t escape autobiography. The point of entry for every book— growing up in a pizzeria?"
May 9, 2017
Everything we do, frantic activities, assignations of meaning to random gestures and grunts, succorings of our organisms and the organisms of those to whom we've developed attachments - it's all designed to distract us from the very abyss in which we formed, the formlessness that fills us.
Dan is told from the highly-associative perspective of Melba Zuzzo, who as of late has been grappling with the myriad mysteries of her town, Dan. As she wanders through the novel and the town, she begins to feel less and less at home, and as she tries to connect the dots her experiences summon memories and memories-within memories. For the reader time expands and compresses constantly. That Ruocco is able to simulate this effect and not once lose the thread is quite an achievement.
"I tried to think about time all at once, was that my problem?" Her voice was a whisper. "Was that what I was always doing wrong, over and over again, every moment?"
Dan is told from the highly-associative perspective of Melba Zuzzo, who as of late has been grappling with the myriad mysteries of her town, Dan. As she wanders through the novel and the town, she begins to feel less and less at home, and as she tries to connect the dots her experiences summon memories and memories-within memories. For the reader time expands and compresses constantly. That Ruocco is able to simulate this effect and not once lose the thread is quite an achievement.
"I tried to think about time all at once, was that my problem?" Her voice was a whisper. "Was that what I was always doing wrong, over and over again, every moment?"
June 6, 2021
This was a reread for me, after reading it for the first time in 2015. It was also the May book choice for the Food Court Books book club. I had chosen this book from our in-store selection of books from the small press Dorothy, A Publishing Project because it's relatively accessible (for this publisher's usual selection) and I hoped would make for good discussion. On reflection, I had forgotten a lot of the details of Dan and instead had only remembered the loose "big picture" of the novella (which is not much to go by) and a few moments. The fact is this novella is a series of moments, both in the present and in flashback, that set up a tone and an atmosphere. Dan isn't reliant on plot, or even character, really. It's in the language, the voice, and their expression that create starkly philosophical situations in which Melba finds herself contemplating huge topics like time and one's place in society. This is a fast read, and one that begs a reread. Even from the re-reader.
October 15, 2014
Dan is a town that shifts. People disappear without necessarily going anywhere. And it may be that the entire town is conspiring against Melba. The whole book kept trapping Melba further and further, and the narrative kept me off balance throughout. The lack of chapters just reinforced the way the book entwines the reader and keeps pulling you and her along.
April 20, 2015
Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland if Alice was a repressed 20-something and Wonderland was a conservative mountain town that actively spread wrongful knowledge among its young women.
April 10, 2025
A kooky and absurd little book. Dan is a very dialogue driven book - with a bit of an Abbott and Costello kind of thing that goes on with quippy and convoluted dialogues. We follow Melba an inhabitant of the town called Dan. There are many mysteries within Dan and mysterious figures who Melba is trying to make sense of.
February 3, 2021
I struggle with novels, especially novels that are one long chapter, so it took me a few attempts to begin this book, but once I got going, I was fully immersed in the land of Dan, where not a single goddamned thing will happen that you expect to happen. Perhaps the most unpredictable novel I've ever read. All hail Ruocco.
March 3, 2016
Finished last week and I honestly don't know what I think about this novel. On one hand, it's so totally weird and un-normal as to make it interesting on purely the level of not knowing what might happen. At various times it reminded me of Brautigan novels or Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman. But there was also a part of me that felt unsatisfied by the fact that none of it ever seems to resolve into anything tangible. I finished it and thought "what was the point of that"? Who knows, maybe that was the point. I guess I can see some people loving this novel and others completely hating it.
I remain ambivalently in the middle of that spectrum.
I remain ambivalently in the middle of that spectrum.
July 21, 2017
I’ve fully enjoyed much of the Dorothy Project books I've read up to this point. Dan is hailed as one of the early classics of their run, and I can see why - it has a pretty bizarre premise (a woman-out-of-place story in a male-dominated village in Europe) and has all the literary trappings to go with it.
I personally found the book to be a little inpenetrable in some regards, and having read it some time before writing this review, I cannot say much of it stuck with me. That's two massive strikes against the book, and I'll overall just say that, in a series of hits for Dorothy, this is a rare miss.
I personally found the book to be a little inpenetrable in some regards, and having read it some time before writing this review, I cannot say much of it stuck with me. That's two massive strikes against the book, and I'll overall just say that, in a series of hits for Dorothy, this is a rare miss.
October 21, 2016
Weird little book about the isolated, potentially post-apocalyptic city of Dan, and one of the few female citizens - Melba Zuzzo.
January 24, 2018
This book was all over the place and incredibly bizarre. I do not think I really got it. Just the same, I absolutely loved every second I spent in its pages.
September 5, 2022
A pocket-sized feminist manifesto, somewhere in style between George Saunders and Jean Genet, following the existential unraveling of a young woman, Melba Zuzzo, in a male-dominated town named Dan that in its hyperbole shines a light on our own circumstances. You with me so far? Because that's mostly it.
'Dan' doesn't blow open into laugh-out-loud absurdity, but rather simmers in a kind of self-contained humor that says more about Ruocco than the world. And the narrative connectedness gets muddled with Melba's disconnectedness in a way that Ruocco doesn't always seem in control of. If, as I suspect, the town of Dan is the real main character of the novel, then it's a pity we weren't given fewer characters to really chew on, or richer details of this town rather than glimpses.
As for the manifesto piece, the men in this book are familiar simulacrums of oppression ranging from the familiar (the paternalistic doctor, the narcissistic ex-boyfriend) to the intriguing (a man who is only described as a "victim"). Melba, like Gregor Samsa, suddenly seems to awaken to the world they're in, except rather than materialize into something else, Melba seems to dematerialize according to the wishes of various men in Dan. Melba, thus, is a stand-in for Ruocco who lives in a male-dominated publishing industry, which she fights against with her feminist press, Dorothy. Ruocco loses me when at the very end Melba literally finds herself prodded by men while lying on a piece of paper. Forgive me, but is it misogynist to want a little more nuance?
No doubt Ruocco is an interesting writer -- like the world of Dan, her sentences are uncanny in sincerely juicy ways. She creates a rich, sensuous ecosystem that is the stuff of child's nightmares. And there are indeed some philosophical nuggets. But as a story or literary experience, I just left feeling underwhelmed.
But after all, as a man, maybe I mistake my own comfort with the status quo presented in Dan as "nothing happening." Touche, Joanna.
'Dan' doesn't blow open into laugh-out-loud absurdity, but rather simmers in a kind of self-contained humor that says more about Ruocco than the world. And the narrative connectedness gets muddled with Melba's disconnectedness in a way that Ruocco doesn't always seem in control of. If, as I suspect, the town of Dan is the real main character of the novel, then it's a pity we weren't given fewer characters to really chew on, or richer details of this town rather than glimpses.
As for the manifesto piece, the men in this book are familiar simulacrums of oppression ranging from the familiar (the paternalistic doctor, the narcissistic ex-boyfriend) to the intriguing (a man who is only described as a "victim"). Melba, like Gregor Samsa, suddenly seems to awaken to the world they're in, except rather than materialize into something else, Melba seems to dematerialize according to the wishes of various men in Dan. Melba, thus, is a stand-in for Ruocco who lives in a male-dominated publishing industry, which she fights against with her feminist press, Dorothy. Ruocco loses me when at the very end Melba literally finds herself prodded by men while lying on a piece of paper. Forgive me, but is it misogynist to want a little more nuance?
No doubt Ruocco is an interesting writer -- like the world of Dan, her sentences are uncanny in sincerely juicy ways. She creates a rich, sensuous ecosystem that is the stuff of child's nightmares. And there are indeed some philosophical nuggets. But as a story or literary experience, I just left feeling underwhelmed.
But after all, as a man, maybe I mistake my own comfort with the status quo presented in Dan as "nothing happening." Touche, Joanna.
December 14, 2018
Another reviewer descried this as "Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland if Alice was a repressed 20-something and Wonderland was a conservative mountain town that actively spread wrongful knowledge among its young women." which is a perfect description. I will definitely need to read this again one day. It is completely bizarre and at times you have no idea what is going on - I loved it.
November 6, 2020
An odd, small, schizophrenic novel (in a good way). The characters interact and conversations lapse into full blown new story lines. Reading it at times confused me, but the prose and writing is excellent. The little tangents spoken are excellent. Would suggest if you like stories that are barely stories, reminds me a little of cesar aira.
February 24, 2022
The language in this is playful and fun, the themes sometimes intense and serious. It holds together for me, but just barely--I'd like a bit more structure, even in more experimental stuff like this. If you like to read another person's dream and have it entertain, humor and be interesting to you, this is the book for you.
November 18, 2018
melba zuzzo is gradually dissipated by the expectations of the people, primarily men, in the town around her. the story digresses freely, with a momentum reminiscent of tyrone slothrop but closer in style and humor to ohle's moldenke stories.
August 3, 2022
3.5 | Dreamlike. And I don’t mean that in a ~floaty, ethereal, everything is beautiful~ sort of way. No, this book actually captures the nonsensical, nightmarish, and never-ending feeling of a dream. The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny in its cheeky absurdity.
Read
January 12, 2021Only Joanna Ruocco could tackle this kind of an ever-stretching narrative in an imaginative town full of audacious characters.
April 8, 2023
Didn’t care for this story at all.
March 9, 2023
Reminded me of of the Daniil Kharms. I was terrified, but evidently it's humorous?
September 20, 2017
Pedro Paramo filtered through the kind of bratty 90's postmodernism, or possibly prairie home companion? Anyway, it's about Melba, who lives in the isolated town of Dan, who may or may not exist, and her various reminisces about her strange childhood, odd situations she gets into, and looming existential dread. Diverting enough, but not quite funny or dense enough to really make much of an impression.
December 31, 2020
Only complaint is that it was too short. The ending is an ending, but there was no reason it had to stop there.
Read
August 20, 2014"Dan" belongs on a syllabus with Stacey Levine's "Frances Johnson" for a stellar lit class on surreal novels about odd intelligent women trapped in small towns + engaging inverted logic and malevolent doctors.
November 1, 2014
The most playful little piece of fiction this year. If the neighborhoods of a Kathryn Davis novel ran into the fuck off intellect of a Thomas Pynchon narrator- one arrives in/at Dan. Beautiful prose that harasses your senses for the sheer fun of it. A loopty-loo bag of tricks.
August 6, 2014
Dreamlike novel of small-town unrest and shifting identities.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews