STARRED Book Review: The Dead and the Desperate

IndieBookView

Nov 13

The Dead and the Desperate

by Dan Denton

Genre: Literary Fiction

ISBN: 9781088295540

Print Length: 268 pages

Publisher: Roadside Press

Reviewed by Maxwell Gillmer

There is no title more fitting for Dan Denton's third book than The Dead and the Desperate. The story is borne of these two elements: those dead of this world, (one figure) and those desperate who are stuck living (the other). However, these two paradigmatic figures are by no means a simplistic demonstration of a forthcoming plot; they rather incite an explosion of realism and humanity that examines the struggles that come with American late-stage capitalism. These figures operate much like shepherds, always a step ahead of the sentence, casting a shadow over the world of the narrative.

The Dead and the Desperate calls into question the function of the novel's title and how it, in an abrupt vision, can initiate a story, much like a portal into another space and time coerced by capitalism and plagued with struggling. Though, what summary is there to give for a story in which a person struggles in their entirety? What plot is there of a beginning, a middle, and an end when the story existed before the first page and continues beyond the last? What Denton offers is the life of the novel's unnamed narrator—a factory worker. It doesn't matter what kind of worker, it doesn't matter what kind of factory; in this universe, reflective of our own, people appear trapped.

The story begins with Ohio, a place to which the narrator said he would never move again after leaving behind lives of divorce, rehab, jail, and homelessness, and yet somehow, he finds himself sucked back after getting a woman pregnant. He does what he is told is right: marry her, get a job at a local factory, support the kid, have another. But for the narrator, living day to day by way of onerous "factory math" where a 12-hour shift feels like 18 hours of labor, what is deemed "right" never seems to pay off.