Daniel Green on the radically disruptive books of Evan Dara

Literary critic Daniel Green has written a longish essay on the writings of Evan Dara. Titled, “Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara,” the essay situates Dara’s work within the context of its postmodern forebears and so-called “experimental” literature in general. Green contends that,

…it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed. Clearly it intends to replace those rules with others applicable only to this work (although any one of Dara’s novels certainly does then provide direction in reading the others), rules that we will have to learn as we read. In this way, Dara’s novels work like all of their predecessors in the lineage of “experimental” fiction, presenting the reader with a heterodox formal arrangement the reader must learn to assimilate by attending closely to the new patterns the work establishes as alternatives to those patterns more conventional fiction has predisposed us to expect. Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979)

Much of Green’s essay is devoted to Dara’s 1995 debut, The Lost Scrapbook, which is a great starting point for anyone interested in Dara. Green describes The Lost Scrapbook as a work that

seems to consist of a series of disconnected episodes (some longer than others) leaning heavily on interior monologue and introducing “characters” whose relationships to each other are not immediately apparent. Moreover, these self-standing scenes don’t merely succeed each other but at times appear to merge, one dissolving into the other, as if the novel’s discourse represents a radio set whose dial is being tuned, bringing in one station before moving on to another.

Green also discusses Dara’s follow-ups to The Lost Scrapbook, 2007’s The Easy Chain and 2013’s Flee, as well as Dara’s most recent work, a 2018 play titled Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins. Green’s reading of the latter seems to inform his conclusion that Dara is ultimately “a moralist, not an aesthete,” a claim that I’m not quite sure I fully agree with (maybe he’s both?)—but I haven’t reread the works (although reading Green’s essay makes me want to). Green’s essay is, to my knowledge the only lengthy measure of Dara’s career to date, although I’m sure it won’t be the last of this under-read and important contemporary writer.

Read “Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara” by Daniel Green.

Read my 2016 interview with Daniel Green.

Read my review of Evan Dara’s play Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins.