The real and the unreal are laminated so tightly in Duplex you find yourself suddenly lost; you don’t know where or when this book takes place, you don’t know what this book is about at all. And that is how it takes you in ... When I finished Duplex I had the unshakable feeling that I’d only read half of the book, and the other half was still in there and if I wanted to finish it, I’d need to read it again. I wasn’t wrong. By then I’d fallen in love with Davis’s writing, what it did to me, that combination of horror and excitement that spilled out of the book, into my past, into the now, into everything around me ... Davis is more subtle in her understanding of the kind of horror girls really need. It’s extremely rare, but there is plenty of it in Duplex and I’m grateful for every word ... strange things keep happening and do not stop ... So, when you are lost in the uncanny woods of this astonishing, double-hinged book, just keep reading, and remember to look up. Kathryn Davis knows right where you are.
...a fluid tapestry of memories and bizarre mythologies interwoven with threads that fray and tear at the slightest touch ... Essentially plotless, the defining arc of Duplex is time. But in Davis’s deft hands, the fabric of time is torn and twisted, gnarled and knotted, not just for the readers of this plunge into surrealistic fantasy, but for the characters themselves ... All the characters seem to take these mind-boggling slingshots into another dimension matter-of-factly, with little displays of emotion or confusion. It’s not so easy for the reader — just as a moment draws us in, it abruptly cracks apart, leaving us breathless and disoriented. Yet Duplex is utterly compelling and hard to put down ... Duplex seems seeded with symbolism, yet it feels deliberately elliptical, just beyond comprehension. Diving into Davis’s universe is a bit like wading into deep, dark water in which you sense but can’t quite see what’s teeming in the currents below ... as confounding as it is provocative.
Duplex resonates on a unique frequency and forces readers to adjust to its wavelength. It’s a book to tune into rather than break down ... A traditional plot or character sketch won’t do this topsy-turvy story justice, and Duplex will be frustrating to readers who demand clarity and continuity. But taken on its own terms—as a book that defies genre and storytelling expectations—this off-kilter world in which humans, robots, and Bodies-without-Souls all co-exist hums beautifully to its own rhythm. It’s a series of dreamlike, often erotic, images and interconnected plot lines that don’t so much build to climax as swell to create an intoxicating atmosphere ... As these references to time build throughout the novel, it’s clear the mystical duplex isn’t as fantastical as it first seemed ... Davis cares most of all not about what those alternate paths might have been, but with how it feels to encounter them. This cosmic novel may give readers the dizzying sense of coming unhinged, but it’s also a reminder that the momentum gained from shifting back and forth between possibilities—not the actual going through the door—is the movement that propels us forward.
Professor Davis is capable of beautiful sentences and turns of a phrase ... Yet while Professor Davis is undeniably a highly skilled author, Duplex reads sluggishly. Although only 250 pages, the book feels bloated. Chapters meander through dreamy sequences and scenes end abruptly without advancing the story. Professor Davis could have removed 50 pages from this book without damaging it ... Alternatively, Professor Davis could have put a little more action into Duplex. Virtuosity is a wonderful gift, but it is a means to an end, not an end unto itself ... With Duplex, Professor Davis sets out to do something very bold: apply the small town realism of Thornton Wilder or Sherwood Anderson to a setting filled with sci-props. Her remarkably non-remarkable treatment of a rusting suburb on the edge of The Twilight Zone is at once interesting and off-putting.
Meanwhile, not one weak word exists in this author’s arsenal. Every word of Duplex, every doomed character, every fractured timeline, drops in the ear, on the mind, in the troubled heart, like a Rain of Beads ... This most awe-inspiring aspect of the writer’s achievement—her own cloud of unknowing—rubs very close to the bone of her primary literary inspiration, the fairy tale, the one genre Davis herself has invoked time and again as the source of her daemonic delights. In the end, Davis’ technique is entirely traditional, a well-turned page out of Hans Christian Andersen’s book: You enchant your reader, you lift them up . . . and then you killingly knock their socks off.
This book worries at times like a small red dachshund worrying at a bone on a kitchen floor. I think it might be one of the best evocations of the experience of time that I’ve ever read—the way, as an older person, you can look back and see so many selves folded inside your mind, the way you can live inside a memory and lose the sense of time passing at all ... It also handles its surrealism in a such a beautifully matter-of-fact way that it makes even the most dedicated 'slipstream' story seem ostentatious ... This book creates a mood that I can only come close to by saying: remember when you were a kid and you’d be outside just as day turned into evening and the moon and sun were out at the same time and you could see your family in the house, through the window, and you felt suddenly like you were watching a television show, or a diorama, of life, and you felt suddenly like there was an impassable gulf between you and that house? That reality was either on the side with you or the side with them, and you weren’t sure which possibility terrified you more? And then you’d go in and everything seemed too small somehow, and it would take you maybe until you’d slept the whole night to feel fully lodged in reality?
On my first reading, Duplex felt less like a story and more like a forest of images and metaphors, something to be wandered through rather than followed to a conclusion, but on my second reading I saw loose ends tied up, questions answered, arcs completed, and it was clear that Duplex exists in a powerful middle ground between poetry and story, containing the satisfaction of figuring out mysterious events and the joy of sentences beautiful beyond their context ... Through Janice's stories, Davis argues that myths are not direct allegories for lived experience, but presentations of realities whose people, places, things, and physics follow different rules than we do. The point is not to make correlations between the image of teenage girls accidentally disintegrated by robots who mistook metaphors in romantic poetry for physical acts of love and some aspect of technology and romance in today's culture (though you could), but to discover the properties of our technology and romance through exploring the properties of Duplex's technology and romance ... How could such an imagination not be a standard by which other imaginations are assessed? How could her name not come up in yearly conversations about major body-of-work prizes?
In marrying the nostalgia of Ray Bradbury with the surreal archetypes of Manuela Draeger and The Hearing Trumpet author Leonora Carrington, Duplex strikes a chord even as the narrative bends into the mysterious. Duplex is a novel as effective in its descriptions of aging, loss and compromise as it is with its manifestations of the uncanny. To Davis’s credit, this juxtaposition never feels arbitrary; rather, it results in a novel that gets under your skin from many different angles.
Duplex has a series of recognizable events though calling the totality of them a plot is like saying that a lava lamp has a narrative arc ... Duplex has a sinister, end-of-days-ish feel though at one point Mary notes the failure of all prophecies foretelling such. Time has multi-dimensional, textural and even emotional qualities: it stretches like taffy or feels 'sad' (though it still 'heals all'). Paradoxes abound: the robots have the ability to see everything that has happened and ever will happen, yet they need humans 'to change things.' There’s a nod to Lewis Carroll in the grey hares that suddenly start appearing everywhere; when people disappear, however, it’s down wormholes, not rabbit holes.
While Davis defies genre in Duplex by crossing through several types—literary fiction, magical realism, fantasy, sci-fi, horror (to name a few)—many elements of the novel stay true to a fairy tale ... Though her approach is gradual, Davis makes clear right from the start: This is no ordinary world, and this will not be an ordinary story ... Part of the genius of Duplex is that Davis doesn’t push any alternate agenda. A wide range of interpretations feels welcome, and at the heart of the book is the lifelong story of Mary and Eddie, told with care and in beautiful sentences. A reader must work hard both to perceive a larger meaning from page-to-page and to understand what’s happening on the level of plot, character, and setting (e.g., is it 1950 or is it a robot future?). Questions inevitably pop up ... The answers to these questions aren’t in the pages of this brilliant novel, and we don’t read to find out; we read because Davis has created a world with language unlike any other, and also like our own.
The world of this novel is both brilliantly strange and gnawingly familiar, though it resembles a dream more than it does our reality. Davis has created a place wherein the boundaries between two people are as flexible as a hinge and as thin as the walls of a duplex, a place where human beings live alongside robots and sorcerers ... Power, soulfulness, desire: weighty themes, and in the hands of a lesser writer Duplex could feel overbearing. But Davis explores each character with democracy, compassion and subtlety ... Davis plays brilliantly on the claustrophobia of American suburbia, and the duplex houses in Mary and Eddie’s neighborhood serve as an ideal site to explore the proximity that both separates and interweaves their occupants ... The novel gives us plenty of titillating whats, but few whys or hows. Though the dynamics between species are described early, I hoped to see them evolve more than they did ... But concrete meaning clearly isn’t what Duplex is after ... Duplex exists in the spaces between, and readers who don’t mind gray areas will very likely enjoy their stay.
I can't remember the last time I read a book so disorienting. Half the time I didn't know what was happening. Who was speaking. Whether or not they actually existed. But I can tell you, reading this book is a blast ... Duplex is a traditional love story tucked inside an adult fairy tale, wrapped in science fiction ... Thankfully, the laws of quantum mechanics do not power Duplex's magnetism. Instead, it is Davis's beautiful prose, her psychological awareness ... Speed-readers, skip sentences at your peril — if only because something will happen that won't make sense for fifty pages, then turn out to be an essential narrative hinge. Halfway through, I put the book down for two days. When I picked it up again, I had to start all over just to understand what the hell was going on. Still, I wouldn't take back one minute of reading. Sometimes really good company, the interesting, mind-expanding kind, leaves you scratching your head.
Kathryn Davis’s novel Duplex reads like a waking dream. Davis’s sentences channel that half-state between consciousness and unconsciousness, that foggy place where you realize you’re waking up but are still enraptured by the vivid imagery that’s been parading through your head all night ... Davis’s approach to introducing the various sci-fi/fantasy elements throughout the book is to operate under the assumption that nothing is out of the ordinary ... This narrative style is in keeping with the dreamlike quality of the prose — Davis is counting on our accepting everything we’re told as fact, as if there’s no reason why things should be any other way ... Going into it expecting a typical dramatic structure is as futile as attempting to impose such strictures on your dreams. In some ways, the absence of that familiar backbone is what makes the novel so absorbing ... I was so enthralled with unraveling and absorbing the details of this weird, wonderful fictional world that I had trouble relating to any of the characters in it ... I reached the end of the book dazzled by Davis’s vast imagination and beautifully expressive language, but largely unaffected by the characters’ journeys.
It weaves a wonderful fabric of fantastic and relatable elements—ranging from light-hearted to horrific—that keeps the reader engaged and waiting for the next sentence. Davis’s writing style is crisp and pointed; her sentences are precise and flow from one image to the next. Her textured writing helps ground the reader in the complicated world of 'stretchable' properties and complex relationships presented in the novel ... It uses the past and the future to bring clarity to the present plot, and it uses the juxtaposition between realism and magical realism—between fantastic mythology and modern reality that harkens back to the suburbs of John Cheever—to give readers a sense of nostalgia while also instilling a sense of unease about the forces they may have missed in their own lives ... The heavy use of magical realism takes a little while to settle into—longer than the suspension of reality fully permeates the text ... Duplex shows the reader that when looking at life, sometimes all that really matters is the perspective.
The book is less a novel than a dream, less populated by characters than by fantasy variations, less an experiment in genre than chaos, and Davis can’t be faulted for her ambition, nor for prose that makes the sky seem like something you’ve never seen and makes robots’ speech utterly quotidian. But where there is no gravity, there can be little pressure, and the result feels somewhat weightless. For all Davis’s virtuosity, readers may have a hard time getting a grip on the story.
Literate science fiction, its deadpan tone controlled, which examines life in a future that may or may not be dystopian ... It has an identifiable narrative arc, following the characters who grow up and age, bear real or raise artificial children, and die. As in conventional realist fiction, not all details are essential, either to the story or the characters, but are present only for the sake of verisimilitude. Fiction can consider diverse objects and registers of experience—My Pretty Pony, robots the size of pins, trading cards stored in cigar boxes stashed in a cluttered closet, myths—submerge all in a uniform tone and so create equivalence: a world that is not our world but that is recognizable, consistent and strange ... More fiction than science fiction, admirably written but not for the average reader of the genre, this book will please and surprise.
