A Review of John Darnielle’s “Universal Harvester”
Weird. Just Weird.
If you haven’t heard the Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas, you’re missing out on something. Recorded with just an acoustic guitar and vocals on a dying tape recorder, there’s something homely and folk-spun about the record that keeps you coming back to it again and again. I owned the album on vinyl, wound up selling my record collection (including this record) to pay rent during a lean time, but — when finances returned — it was one of the very first albums that I bought back. So I’m a little bit of a fan of the group, which revolves around the persona of John Darnielle, who is the guitarist and vocalist of said outfit. What I didn’t know is that Darnielle is an accomplished author. His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. That’s pretty high-flalootin’ company to keep.
So how does Universal Harvester, his difficult sophomore effort, stack up? Weeeeeeell, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m glad to have read it, and laud it as a highly original piece of literary fiction. However, the character motivations don’t jive and things in the plot remain unexplained. It’s a slim volume at just more than 200 pages, but it feels as though it could have been doubled in length just to have the space to make sense of it all. Darnielle’s writing is lean and compact, which is an asset, but logic seems to allude him — at least, here.
Universal Harvester is, at the outset, is set at the turn of the millennium and is about a 20-something named Jeremy who works a dead-end job as a clerk in a video store. (Hello, Kevin Smith.) The writing is on the wall: Netflix is coming to shut the store down, even though nobody really realizes it yet as Netflix is still far away off. Still, there’s a feeling that the store can’t last all that much longer. One day while at work, a customer returns a tape while noting to Jeremy that something else has been recorded over a portion of the movie. Jeremy investigates by taking the tape home to watch. There, he sees troubling images coming from his TV screen — although the images are not quite so troubling as discovering you’ve uncovered a snuff video, say. Still, the tape disturbs him. Eventually, more tapes start showing up in the store with the same problem.
The plot, from there, veers into the past of small-town life. It eventually flash-forwards into the future as well. Jeremy, and what happens upon he and his co-workers’ investigation into what lies on the tapes, forms the short novel’s centrepiece. We learn that Jeremy’s mother passed away six years prior in a car accident, something that impacts his home life as he lives with his dad. Universal Harvester is, in many ways, a book about the loss of mothers — as much as it is about sketchy images captured on videotape. Here’s the thing, though: none of it makes very much sense. To say why would lapse into plot spoiler territory, but, suffice to say, this novel is one big WTF? (Although parts of it do seem to make sense upon reflection.)
Still, we don’t know what the motivation behind these images being spliced into videotape really is. It becomes clear at the end what the images are of, but the “why put them onto a store’s videotape selection?” question never is really revealed. If you know what I do about this book, you still won’t know what has prompted one person to do so. What are they seeking to get out of doing this? We don’t really understand. You could perhaps write the person off as a bit of a kook, but that might be going too far.
The novel has its lapses by moving forward and back through time, as though the author has hit the rewind and fast-forward buttons on his VCR at opportune moments. Some of this detail seems superfluous. Plus, key things in the plot are left unspoken — such as how one video store clerk winds up in a single vehicle accident by the house that is the source of the taped images. The book asks you, the reader, to fill in the gaps. In a sense, that seems to increase the sense of unease and foreboding that Universal Harvester’s mood elicits. However, the book is all mood and little brains.
I do have to say that Universal Harvester is an arty book. It plays like the script for a low-budget independent movie directed by Hal Hartley or Jim Jarmusch. There’s some real style to be had, but the substance is rather lacking. This book suffers from dream logic, the kind of fuzziness you struggle to recall once your head has come off of the pillow. To that end, the book may dazzle and delight some readers who prefer that kind of thing. Me? I found Universal Harvester to be, in parts, labourious. There’s something missing at the heart of the book. Why the characters act the way that they do is purely elliptical. It doesn’t make much sense. You could say that the novel is just plain weird for the sake of being weird.
It is said that sophomore novels are difficult. If you doubt that, put Universal Harvester on your to-read pile. There are great moments here: the discovery of who the narrator really is, the tender flashes between fathers and sons, the discussion of outmoded art forms. Still, there’s something missing in this book, and that is it doesn’t resonate because it is so far out in left field once you discover what seems to be going on, which, of course, is never fully explained. I was disappointed in Universal Harvester. Not too disappointed, though. Why? I know that John Darnielle has something to fall back on should his literary career sputter: he makes some great music. Maybe that’s more than enough for me.
John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester will be published in paperback by Picador on February 6, 2018.
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