The Daredevils: A Novel

by Gary Amdahl

Overview

A twelve-year-old boy, middle son in a wealthy, politically and culturally prominent San Francisco family, watches his city disappear in the earthquake and fires of 1906. His father him that nothing has been lost that cannot be swiftly and easily replaced. He quotes Virgil: “Nothing unreal is allowed to survive.” The boy turns this stark Stoic philosophical “consolation” into the radical theater practices of the day, in the course of which he involves himself with radical labor struggles: anarchists, Wobblies, socialists of every stripe. He learns that politics is meta-acting, and he and his girlfriend—a Connecticut mill girl who is on the verge of national recognition as a spokesperson for workers—embark on a speaking tour with a Midwestern anti-railroad, pro-farmer group and take their political, philosophical, and artistic ethos to the farthest limits of the real and the unreal, where they find there is no useful distinction between the two.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619027664
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/01/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Gary Amdahl has published six books, and produced nine plays. He was awarded two Jerome Fellowships at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, AGNI, A Public Space and many other monthlies, weeklies, and dailies. He lives in Redlands, CA and is married to author Leslie Brody.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Gary Amdahl

“Amdahl is one whose gifts are staggering and hard-won. The stories relate, by the way of guts through grace, the wholeness of a novel too good for mere philosophy. Gary Amdahl knows sports, men, women, and dogs, thank God, so thoroughly as to make them myth. Camus comes to mind: thought with extreme muscle.” —Barry Hannah

Praise for Visigoth:

"Although rich in anger and brutality, the stories collected in Visigoth are told with charm and a ranging, passionate intelligence." -- Ken Kalfus

"Gary Amdahl's vivid stories are at once lyrical and unexpectedly in your face. . . A book we'll remember." -- Thomas McGuane

"The men. . . . range from lotharios. . . to hockey jocks. . . But in Amdahl's highly literary, tragicomic vision, they melt our doubting hearts." -- Elle Magazine

"These are smart, fully realized stories – sensitive, layered and deliberate ... there’s something freeing, refreshing, about Amdahl’s voracious, inappropriate Visigoths." -- The Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

2015-11-17
Amid the violent labor struggles of early-20th-century America, the wealthy son of a prominent San Francisco family immerses himself in theater and politics and obsesses over the distinction (or lack thereof) between performance and "real" life. All the world's a stage in Amdahl's (The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts, 2013, etc.) dense, sometimes confounding novel. The bulk of the action takes place in the run-up to America's entry into World War I. Charles Minot, son of a mover and shaker with connections to Theodore Roosevelt, is staging a production of Henry James' The American at his family's theater. Self-serious and insecure, Charles becomes involved with Vera, one of his actresses, and through her dives headfirst into the gritty world of radical labor activists. After Charles' affiliation with alleged anarchists is revealed in the press, his theater is bombed during a performance. Charles and Vera repair to the Midwest, where they consort with a colorful cast of unionists and their adversaries and revel in the performative nature of "reality." This obsession with life as theater is provocative, but the idea is explored so often and so pointedly ("He was not free of the necessary falseness of reality, not free of the stage, but wished to be") that it becomes challenging to invest in the characters. Amdahl's command of language is powerful, but the emotional payoff isn't commensurate with the intellectual investment required to appreciate this ambitious novel. So immersed is Amdahl in the politics of the era and the philosophical questions at the novel's core that he too often sacrifices clarity for concept.

Kirkus Reviews