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Turner House
Abstract
Turner House is a novel about loss, rich with the polyphonic voices of the mute, the despairing, the intransigent. Jesse, the younger of the two main male characters, midway through the book stops at an adult book and video store on his way to the airport. He's going back to California after a dismal homecoming in North Dakota. He's desperate to win back his former girlfriend, Kathy, and is anguished by feelings of loneliness and sexual craving. He looked at the video tapes for sale and imagined a life locked in a room, locked away from others with only himself as victim and victimizer ... He felt his lust as a hammer to his head ... Jesse focuses constantly on his place in the world relative to others. His is a sensual world, with all manner of crucial input to be monitored: looks, touches, smells, voices, all coming to him, he believes, through the focused and subjective agency of others. The other chief character, Charlie, is a middle-aged man who is equally influenced by myriad stimuli, especially sound. He doesn't pursue human contact, but instead seeks an autonomous and remote primal influence. (He felt) words, sounds, pulsations along his neck, back and scalp. His buffing machine became a staticky cloak around his head. Sounds were always sensations. Especially when someone else was in charge of the sound, like the woman at the library, the large, middle-aged woman who ran the vacuum cleaner around his outstretched feet while he sat quietly, listening, pretending to read, letting the sound run over him. The language of the novel focuses on sounds: of voices and midnight winds and trains chugging uphill in the Cascades, with alliteration and polysyndeton and run-on sentences drawing the story forward in an obsessive meander that mimics the Pacific Starlight's progress through the forests of the Pacific Northwest.(DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI)
Subject Area
American literature|Modern literature|Creative writing
Recommended Citation
Davidson, Iver, "Turner House" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9812350.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9812350