07/23/2018
Orphaned after his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance, William Tyce, the young protagonist of this inventive, illuminating debut set in the rural Midwest, imposes order on the sudden chaos of his life by way of an alphabetical glossary, creating his own definitions for things such as revelation, mullet, and typewriter (“You may be the greatest writer of all time but until you have a typewriter your work will not be taken seriously”). The short, poetic entries track William’s going to live with his gambler uncle, that same uncle’s imprisonment for arson, and William’s ensuing raft journey downriver to find a man, Jim “River” Swift, who may have once known his father. The book’s cumulative effect is much subtler than its allusions to Twain would suggest, with the central narrative mainly serving as a pretense for Reed to examine William’s unique psychology, vocabulary, and worldview. Sections on heavy topics like absence are no less a part of William’s character than those that offer more frivolous descriptions of the gypsy parachute house or icing of cake (“Most arousing part of a cake”). In this novel, Reed offers an impressionistic and profound exploration of self and consciousness. (Sept.)
Captivating . . . Through its deceptively simple structure, A Key to Treehouse Living creates a portrait of a compelling, perceptive adolescent who keeps slipping through society’s cracks.
Powered in part by longing and a need to make odd associations add up, this very appealing novel emplys jellybeans and gypsies,
tree forts and rafts, and a character known as El Hondero to trace the odd conjuring that this narrator brings us in on. A memorable debut.
A Key To Treehouse Living’s precocious autodidact manages his abandonment at the world's hands by remembering that courage might be the ability to not think too long about the worst that can happen. A moving and funny and impressive debut.
A Key to Treehouse Living is a beautiful book that treats language, family, childhood, and storytelling as flexible, luminous, dangerous things. William Tyce is a narrator as compelling as Mark Haddon's Christopher John Francis Boone and Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar Schell.
Huckleberry Finn advanced out of antebellum doldrums into the poetic modern perverse, with the same charm. Subtle, daring, brilliant.
A Key to Treehouse Living by Elliot Reed scrambles up all the customary codes of the novel to piece together, at last, the moving story of a lost boy searching out his place in the world. What appears as all indexed coda turns out to be a well-told tale and, more vitally for me, the accumulation of enormous incidental pleasures.
A Key to Treehouse Living—it’s terrific, funny, poignant and just weird enough, transcends that great form. I ate it up.
Disorienting, weirdly wise, indescribably transparent,
impossibly recognizable. Fun, too.
William sets off down river in a Huck Finn-esque journey that takes him physically and emotionally through mystical and awe-inspiring spaces. . . . giving a book about existential darkness an undeniable sense of beauty and wonder."
Dark yet uplifting . . . This novel's true joy may be the wonder it radiates about a world as beautiful as it is cruel. See 'OVERCOME BY EMOTION.'
2018-06-18
An adolescent orphan writes a glossarylike "key" to his life in Reed's astute, experimental, and very affecting debut.William Tyce's key begins with ABSENCE and proceeds in roughly alphabetical order through such terms as BABY MEMORIES, BOATING IN BASEMENTS, COURAGE, FAULTY WISHING, GYPSIES, MORTAL BETRAYAL, and PHILOSOPHY OF NIHILISM. Abandoned by his parents, living in his uncle's mansion in a city in the Midwest, William's life, as he projects it onto these pages, is an eccentrically human alchemy of loneliness, boredom, jealousy, nostalgia, brutality, and folk mythologies; and his insights range from beautifully perceptive ("the brain lives on patterns the way a blade of grass lives on sunlight") to darkly humorous ("put a nail through a lemon, whip it out the window of a treehouse, bean a kid with it—that kid will probably move on"). We learn that BETTA FISH "can cure you of nightmares if you hold them in your mouth for ten seconds each night before you go to sleep," and that a "Daddy" is "a false authority," and if one tries to climb into your treehouse, you will have to "beat on his fingers with a hammer." Grim? Indeed. There is much darkness in poor William's ledger, especially as—moving down the alphabet—his life veers toward narrative, forsaking the static sadness of his youth. First, William's uncle—"the authority on high-stakes gambling"—is arrested for arson and insurance fraud, leaving him without a caregiver (see LIVING IN BUNKHOUSES FOR GIRLS AND BOYS WHO ARE WARDS OF THE STATE). Then he runs away, living under a bridge and taking up drinking. He feels increasingly like "the world [is] a chaotic soup in which [he's] slowly being boiled." To do something, he eventually builds a raft and casts off downriver (see NEBULOUS PLANS). The life that follows necessitate glossary entries like MYSTICAL VISION, NEAR DEATH, OCCUPANTS OF HOLDING AREAS IN RURAL JAILS, PURPOSE, REVELATION, TEMPTATION, and more—all the way to YONDER, THE WILD BLUE.Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive—Reed has made a marvelous debut.
