Starred review for Stunt in the Quill & Quire
What would Lolita have been like if Nabokov had imagined a child obsessively, incestuously in love with a grown man, a man as capricious and oblivious as a little girl? What is Humbert Humbert and Lolita's roles had been reversed? The result would be Stunt, playwright Claudia Dey's first novel. Prefaced by a quote from Lolita, Dey's book begins as a Nabokovian delight, and Dey sustains this high level of writing throughout. The novel has lurking beauty, with strange pathways and a population of absurd characters. Nothing is normal, nothing is plain.
When nine-year-old Eugenia awakens to find her father gone, she begins her journey to find him, knowing, as only the obsessed can, that he didn't mean to leave her behind. The story of Stunt is the one Eugenia tells to the absent father, and her aching for him is haunting: 'I close my eyes and smell you in: unwashed man skin, old smoke, cat, wet wool, apple. I reach out in the dark ... touch my finger to your mouth, your lips ...'
The beauty of Dey's prose is matched by the oddities of the narrative. Eugenia lives with her sister -- who is simultaneously a young beauty and an old hag -- and her mother, Mink, a woman who is 'the colour of orchids' and yet rather sordid. After her father disappears, Eugenia and her sister double in age overnight, and Eugenia, donning her father's suit, leaves home to begin her search. Her only clues? Postcards he sends from outer space, of course.
Despite the magic-realism flourishes, the story's development seems natural. Stunt is mesmerizing, rewarding, and breathtaking. Dey never lets up, never writes simply, plainly, or boringly. Like Eugenia's nightfall, Dey's book is 'all dark majesty and menace,' and wonderful to read.
