Dig by A.S. King
The Text Publishing Co., 2019. ISBN: 9781925773521. 391p.
(Age: 15+) Highly recommended. Themes: Bildungsroman/Family. The
Shoveler moves to town with his drifter mother. He begins the
familiar process of grappling with a new school, making friends and
finding a part-time job. In order to deal with ongoing domestic
violence, Loretta constructs a scripted fantasy world centring
around her Flea Circus. Malcom spends weekends off-shore with his
dying father as his anxiety mounts. CanIHelpYou is a drive-thru
attendant and local drug dealer tortured by her mother's racism.
Throughout the book, our delight in unearthing how the characters
are entwined is palpable.
Dig begins as a play with a cast but quickly changes into a
novel - a postmodern feast of cumulative scenes mostly written in
the first person by alternating characters. Only The Freak, Jake and
Bill, and Malcom's grandparents Marla and Gottfried, are chronicled
by an all-seeing narrator. The Freak has the ability to astral
travel anywhere, frequently to be of assistance to the other
characters. Brothers, Jake and Bill have a strained relationship as
do Marla and Gottfried. Jake and Gottfried never meet but are linked
by a twisted subservience and loyalty towards their respective
'partners'.
The lack of nomenclature and ambiguity seems unsettling at first but
as separate lives progress, we know they are converging and we are
utterly fascinated. The amusing technique of not naming characters
explicitly is reminiscent of Anna Burns' Milkman, which won
the 2018 Man Booker, however King's chapters are tantalizingly brief
scenes or flashes in a fast moving montage.
A shared history of the ancestral potato farm, is a sustained
metaphor which connects all the estranged family members. Sebold's,
The Lovely Bones, will come to mind as we approach the final
scenes. Family patriarch, Gottfried, delivers one final epiphany of
complacency and regret. We ponder how often do our children become
our teachers? Dig represents the counter-intuitiveness of
the best of the YA genre in being an ingeniously choreographed
cautionary tale for all ages.
Deborah Robins