Vermont News Guide

Overlook Press

- Reviewed by Mark Via

From the opening scene of From Away, a comic novel by the Middlesex author David Carkeet, we know we are in the company of an oddball. Denny Braintree, a traveling writer for a model train magazine, is fishtailing along an icy Vermont highway. When his car spins around, he waves to the drivers behind him before rolling off the road into a ditch. As help arrives, he steps out of his car and shouts, “Welcome to my crash site!”

Denny is forced to spend the night in a Montpelier hotel, where in short order he becomes the prime suspect in a woman's mysterious death and realizes that he is the spitting image of a local man who disappeared three years earlier. To say that Denny assumes the identity of his double to elude responsibility for the crime would be oversimplifying the story, but soon Denny is living the life of Homer Dumpling, moving into the man's house and reconnecting with his old friends and acquaintances, even his girlfriend. Comic mayhem ensues.

Denny’s personality carries the book. He is a 300-pound misfit, oblivious to the nuances of typical social intercourse, lacking a filter between his eccentric brain and his overactive mouth.He invents elaborate life histories for the plastic figures in his model train layouts, but looking down on Montpelier from an elevated spot, he likens it to a toy town and admires its “realism” and actual moving people. In some ways he resembles Ignatius J. Reilly, the self-involved, delusional, rotund hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. Denny seems unaware of his obnoxiousness, with an inflated sense of his own charm. “He felt pity for humanity because they were ignorant of Dennis Braintree.”

Whatever his failings, though, Denny does show a capacity for adapting to the uncertainty and tension of becoming Homer, navigating a new city and network of people with aplomb. He inhabits his stolen identity like a more amusing, less sociopathic version of Tom Ripley, and it is great fun to watch him, and by extension Carkeet, go through the mental contortions necessary to maintain the subterfuge as the plot complications pile up. Denny shambles into the pages of From Away as something of a buffoon, but it is a credit to the author’s talents that he becomes more and more likable, and even heroic, as the book progresses.

In 2010, Overlook Press also re-released three of the author’s earlier novels: Double Negative (1980), The Full Catastrophe (1990) and The Error of Our Ways (1997). Carkeet’s work is hilarious, humane and highly original.

Mark Via is a freelance writer in Weston, Vermont.