The Curfew

April 25, 2011
"GOOD CITIZENS SPEND THEIR NIGHTS ABED." So goes the edict of Ball's unsettling new novel (after The Way Through Doors). Set in the city of C, a dystopic near-future Chicago, William Drysdale and his mute eight-year-old daughter, Molly, attempt to keep their heads down in a dangerous city of murders, suspicious neighbors, and a network of secret police. The shadowy government imposes a mercurial nightly curfew; musical performances have been outlawed, weekends abolished. Drysdale, a former virtuoso violinist, now works as an epitaphorist, helping others write their epitaphs. Ball divides his slim novel into two parts, the first dealing with William's search for his disappeared wife and a growing counterrevolutionary movement. The second details a phantasmagorical puppet show conducted by Molly that explores her parents' past and future. Written in clipped and brutal prose that shares the page with a lot of white space, the compelling narrative is buoyed by nuanced characters, but ultimiately lacks punch. Still, Ball's ideas and heart make this a very compelling read.

June 1, 2011

Minimalist tale of a former violinist turned epitaph scribe, and his daughter.

More accessible than his last (The Way Through Doors, 2009), Ball's third novel at least makes his characters' predicament plain from the outset. A dystopian unnamed country and city are the setting. In this post-revolutionary state, systematic purges and bloodbaths have given way to everyday ambiguous incidents of what could be state-sponsored persecution or random street violence. It's hard to tell, because the police have all become secret police—even their stations are undercover—and government agents are in disguise, principally from each other. William, who was once a virtuoso violinist before the symphonies were disbanded and music itself banned, now works writing epitaphs—quirky ones for people whose sole creative outlet these days is imagining what should be inscribed on their own or others' tombstones. William's 9-year-old daughter Molly is mute but gifted with a prodigious imagination. He has raised her ever since his wife Louisa was "disappeared" by the government years before. William and Molly lead a colorless but relatively placid existence, carefully avoiding drawing attention to themselves, especially by going out after evening curfew, when citizens not at home are deemed to be up to no good—whatever "good" is. However, a former friend recognizes him on the street and draws William back into a group of wine-drinking insurgents, with a promise of revelations about what really happened to Louisa. In a risky move, William leaves Molly with elderly neighbors and steals away to a subversive nighttime gathering, where he receives a precious contraband violin as well as a dossier on Louisa. As the night proceeds, Molly and the neighbors enact an elaborate puppet show, which elucidates her parents' visionary legacy and provides her with a map of her future after the inevitable happens. In Ball's delicately etched nightmare, there's still room in the regime for ordinary comforts like pea soup—trouble is, the spoons are too small.

Mordantly morbid.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2011
There is a hushed and elegiac quality to this nocturne of a novel, as befits its setting, a city in the grip of covert sinister forces. Everyone is under surveillance, and everyone lives in fear. Weekends have been abolished, and a curfew is rigorously maintained. There are no uniformed police, courts, or jails; punishment is swift and deadly. William's wife is missing, and his beloved smart young daughter is mute. Silent in a silenced world. Of course, music is forbidden, so William, a brilliant violinist, works as an epitaphorist, helping mourning families compose gravestone epitaphs. He does his work with dignified sensitivity, deftly defining entire lives in just a few words, just as Ball does with ominous lyricism in this stunningly concentrated novel. A poet as well as a highly imaginative fiction writer, Ball (The Way through Doors, 2009) possesses a remarkably mythic sensibility, achieving a spare yet merciful mode that brings Borges, Calvino, and Simic to mind. Solemn beauty, beguiling invention, and unnerving insights into insidious tyranny and terror and depthless sorrow make for a haunting dystopian tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)