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alyssa_sian_reads's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
briandice's review
5.0
We bulldoze small and inconvenient fields of strawberries or corn and replace them with the increasing complexity of everyday life: promised lands, the right of “choice”, boundaries, color-schemes, paper mills, etc.
Everything about this book screams. The cerulean sky book cover, contrailed and disrupted by lonely airliner shouts for attention. The single paragraph, 140-page narrative told by protagonist Mrs. Robertson is eardrum piercing in its dead-on, compact sentences that combine in a depth charge force. This must be what it is like to read a book in a single sitting in a room immediately after the discharge of a flash grenade. Even the title with its extra spacing between letters is necessary. This is sprawl, after all. We need the room.
I lived for many years in far north Dallas, Texas – a place where suburban sprawl has its own level of personification that feels almost sinister. Driving up the toll road there comes a time where the exits are interchangeable; the mega-malls, chain restaurants and housing developments are a blueprint for cultural death and meth addiction. It nearly killed me to get out of that environment. I would occasionally drive to work in the morning and look at the perfect lawns, the cookie-cutter homes and wonder how the fathers/husbands, wives/mothers that inhabited that environment viewed their lives, because I knew I hated mine. I’m certainly not saying that everyone in Suburban Sprawl experiences the world the way that Danielle Dutton has described in this book. But I have to believe that many have and do.
An American horror story? Yes.
It’s all in the eye, the beauty of the suburbs, its sharp whitish light, the lack of logical relationships…
tipi's review
3.0
Recommended for fans of Virginia Woolf because its narrative technique is clearly inspired by the spasmodic first ~40 pages of Mrs. Dalloway, where the limited omniscient narrator's attention irrationally shifts from object to object and person to person.еКBut unlike Mrs. Dalloway's narrator, Sprawl‰ЫЄs narration remains rooted in the first-person throughout (presumably, Dutton‰ЫЄs own autobiographical perspective).
It‰ЫЄs filled with meandering descriptions of the kinds of objects one might expect to see in suburban homes and neighborhoods. But I feel like this statement doesn‰ЫЄt do the book justice; I‰ЫЄm making it out to be yet another twenty-first century critique of materialism. Sure, Sprawl could be a critique of materialism, but I‰ЫЄm doubtful. Sometimes I get the feeling that every piece of creative writing these days is an implicit critique of materialism, but this feels more like an embrace than a judgment.
It‰ЫЄs filled with meandering descriptions of the kinds of objects one might expect to see in suburban homes and neighborhoods. But I feel like this statement doesn‰ЫЄt do the book justice; I‰ЫЄm making it out to be yet another twenty-first century critique of materialism. Sure, Sprawl could be a critique of materialism, but I‰ЫЄm doubtful. Sometimes I get the feeling that every piece of creative writing these days is an implicit critique of materialism, but this feels more like an embrace than a judgment.
kylefwill's review
5.0
You think, "There is no such thing as a perfect sentence," and then Danielle Dutton writes a few hundred of them.
aimawaymessage's review
5.0
“To celebrate, we offer low-interest loans to the nameless kids who wander the town. I am filled to the brim with my own brand of philanthropy and consider writing a speech. Then I eat cheeses and crackers and watch television and eat strawberry preserves on toast.”
“Still, the women, they weep all the time. I’d shake them, but it’s not as if we’re deserted here. We all agreed to this.”
“Still, the women, they weep all the time. I’d shake them, but it’s not as if we’re deserted here. We all agreed to this.”
garleighc's review
5.0
So this book is a 140-page long paragraph of a suburban housewife's life experience. I don't really know what else I can say to describe it or make any assertions about this, but the book is timeless in that everything that happens has no temporal relation to anything else. Literally every "event" that happens in this book is just a description of something and we bounce around between different scenes with no transition. I don't know what to make of this book but I loved it and it left me simultaneously creeped out and contemplative.
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