PositiveZYZZYVA...while the town feels somewhat out of its time...the novel’s town vs. city divide also speaks to our current era. Xenophobia and economic rage are two potent forces in the air right now and their influence is not by any stretch of the imagination confined to the United States ... Also very 2020 and hovering over the novel is an apocalyptic foreboding ... The Town is an impressive debut; perhaps most so for how Prescott maintains its singular and beguiling mood for the entirety of the novel—part comic satire, part existential horror. Prescott effectively conveys the sense that history and art seem incapable of reflecting the calamity of our present moment. There is only one question that continues to haunt both the narrator and the town’s residents, one that perhaps speaks to the Western world at large: is it that we are disappearing or are we, in the most meaningful sense of the word, already gone?
