The Town

December 15, 2019
A writer goes searching for vanished Australian communities in this dark allegorical debut. The (fittingly) nameless narrator of this novel has a notion to write a book about the "disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales," so he arrives in a (fittingly) nameless community to conduct his research. But what's to investigate? Commerce seems restricted to a Woolworths and a bar nobody patronizes; the annual community get-together always degrades into fisticuffs; Ciara, the DJ at the local radio station whom he befriends, suspects nobody is tuning in; and the librarian has no history to point to. In some ways the novel can be read as a kind of lament for a disappearing sense of community and willful ignorance of the past; the nameless town is what you get when you have an infrastructure (homes, roads, train lines) but no sense of a social contract. But the narrator's (and Prescott's) affect is so cool that it resists characterization as a critique or satire; the novel at times recalls the slacker-lit of Douglas Coupland, all emotional blankness and deep skepticism about humanity. The novel gets something of a lift in its latter portions as the narrator's friendship with Ciara deepens (though, pointedly, the relationship remains platonic) as they try to find out who's sending cassettes of eerie music to the station. And when seemingly bottomless holes begin appearing in town, the novel acquires a kind of deadpan comedy as the town begins to swallow up its own: "Then [the holes] started to consume furniture, and thoroughfares, and places where people might sometimes want to stand." It's no small feat to conjure up a town in fiction solely through what it lacks, but the place is hard to settle into, as a metaphor or anything else. A conceptually ingenious if chilly dystopian yarn.

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December 23, 2019
Prescott debuts with a promising allegory of an Australia in cultural and economic flux. An unnamed narrator moves to the Central West of New South Wales, planning to work on a book about rural towns in the region that have “simply disappeared” from the landscape along with the people who lived in them. After renting a room and getting a job in a grocery store, where he plays back dictations of his work in progress, vaguely planned as a hybrid of journalism and horror, the narrator befriends his roommate Rob’s girlfriend, Ciara, a DJ with a late-night slot at a community radio station. Her feedback on the narrator’s book (“she couldn’t tell whether the book was fiction or fact”) echoes questions that are sure to emerge from the reader. As bottomless holes start appearing throughout the town, people and buildings begin to vanish, the cost of goods increases, and civic order unravels. Ciara, who’s broken up with Rob, plans an escape with the narrator. While the ephemeral details wear thin (“As the town disappeared, so did my grip on any particular town truth”), Prescott brilliantly captures the disconcerting effect of a town’s changing storefronts, people, and customs on the newcomer and Ciara, offering stark reflections on the young characters’ search for a sense of definition and permanence. Prescott is off to a strong start.

February 1, 2020
In a vague, blurry version of Australia, somewhere in the west, The Town's unnamed narrator is a writer, seeking the truth about a rumor he's heard?that some towns like the one he's just landed in have simply disappeared into thin air. At first he functions as a sort of Nick Carraway, listening as the many denizens of his new residence tell their bizarre and emotional stories. The people never leave, and the town is totally isolated and insulated from the rest of the world; the bus lines run even though there are no passengers; and everyone is into drinking and fighting. When mysterious holes start appearing all over the town, the narrator realizes that something big is about to happen. But by then, has the town already disappeared? This novel doesn't fit cleanly into any particular genre. Instead, readers will need to construct their own meaning from the narrator's plight. Prescott's beguiling debut will appeal to readers who enjoy existential, sparse fiction, like Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)