The Walking Tour - Softcover

Davis, Kathryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395945410 ISBN 13: 9780395945414

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1999

Synopsis

It is the turn of this century. Two couples -- businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow and Snow's wife Ruth Farr -- have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who's taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge. By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.

About this title

About the Authors

Kathryn Davis teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Kathryn Davis is the recipient of a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and the 1999 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Davis teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and lives with her husband and daughter in Vermont.

Reviews

Davis's fourth and thoroughly engaging novel (after Hell) is a witty blend of genres: mystery, courtroom drama, futuristic tale and a reworking of Welsh myth. In some unspecified year in the 21st century, when ideologies have transformed to the point where "the whole idea of edge... [has]... become a thing of the past," Susan R. Rose hides away on Maine's coast, in what was once her family home, reconstructing the events that led to her mother's disappearance and certain death during a walking tour through Wales, when Susan was 13. Equipped with letters and cards sent by her mother, a famous painter; a stack of unlabeled photos; a transcript from a wrongful death suit; and a laptop notebook her mother's oldest friend (and deepest rival) kept, Susan pieces together the spats, jealousies and sudden couplings of the tourists on a pilgrimage. Although she is at first alone, Susan's privacy is invaded by Monkey, a boy encamped nearby. He's a Strag, a member of a futuristic culture that is propertyless and thus lawless, "a triumph of the virtual." As in any good mystery, several possible suspects emerge with a variety of reasons to have killed Carole Ridingham Rose (even Monkey could hold a clue), yet Davis manages to keep this plot line alive while ingeniously weaving her imaginative settings. The playfulness of Davis's writing is irresistible. Laced with fairy tales, neologisms and poems, her prose is clever, sometimes dazzling, skating lightly over complex ideas that otherwise might bog down the narrative. Looking at an Andy Warhol painting, Susan's father says to her mother, "I like it. It's like money; it skips the middle step." One insistent theme surfacing in this highly original novel is the relationships between property and morality, between time and space. Davis's take on these subjects is intellectually rigorous, while the suspense remains satisfyingly taut. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Davis, who seems equal parts Jane Austen and Isak Dinesen, offers a somber fable of longing, frustrated love, and guilt. Once again (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993, etc.), Davis draws from a variety of genres (the mystery, the novel of manners, the speculative) to assemble her narrative: in part the attempt of a grown, and still despairing, daughterwhile on a walking tour of Walesto pierce the various mysteries surrounding the supposed death of her mother, a brilliant painter and a schizophrenic; and also in part a precise study of the duplicitous interactions among the painter, Carole, her husband, Bobby, and her supposed best friend, Ruth, a novelist, and Coleman, Ruth's husband. Davis has a keen ear for the brash chat of bright, uncertain, driven people. Bobby and Coleman have become rich as a result of ``SnowWrite&RoseRead,'' a method that allows readers to interact aggressively with any electronic text, so that the space between reader and writer vanishes. All of this is described by Susan from the vantage point of some point in the 21st century, when the environment is unraveling, society diminishing, technology collapsing. In the decaying ruins of her parents mansion, Susan sits, using Ruth's journals, her mother's letters, and the extensive inquest transcripts, to piece together what happened in Wales. What emerges is a series of betrayals: of Bobby by Coleman, of Carole by Ruth, and of Carole by the ever-bored and amorous Bobby. There is, at the end, a startling suggestion about Carole's fate, verging on the visionary. Along the way, Davis, in a prose that nicely mingles a cool, ironic tone with exact, perfect descriptions of landscapes and ruins, and of the charged interactions between characters, offers an acidic portrait of the money-mad present, as well as a provocative brief on art's place and purpose. A complex, tightly packed, ambitious work, by one of the most thoroughly original (and valuable) of contemporary writers. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Robert Rose, his wife, Carole, his business partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth, are on a walking tour of Wales. There is a fatal accident and, subsequently, a negligence trial. Susan, the daughter of Robert and Carole, is unconvinced of the facts and tries to piece together in her own mind what happened, using the court transcripts, letters from her mother, and Ruth's electronic journal. Susan narrates her story from an undefined future, which makes it somewhat difficult to keep straight in which time period events are happening. However, the novel's focus isn't so much on the mysterious accident. Susan's is the voice through which Davis contemplates all things profound, and it is a minor character--an obnoxious, prophetic vagrant named Monkey--who imposes his life and views on Susan and allows Davis to play devil's advocate. The characters are interesting and there is strength in the story, but being spoon-fed Davis' revelations may leave a bitter taste. Carolyn Kubisz

Businessman Bobby Rose and software guru Coleman Snow anticipate that their new joint venture will make them wealthy and also revolutionize the reader/text environment (totally interactive interface!) but not that it will revolutionize society as well. Their wealth at the sale of the enterprise leads them and their wives on a less-than-idyllic walking tour of Wales with an oddly mixed ensemble, where a mysterious fatality occurs. From the future, Rose's daughter tries to unravel the events of the tour from her ruined estate, drawing on court records, journals, and an old laptop. Davis (Labrador, etc.) offers an unusual hybrid of sf, mystery, and literary fiction that keeps the reader guessing. One quibble: some intriguing facets of the future (e.g. "Strag culture") are hinted at too often before helpful elaboration kicks in. Otherwise, an excellent choice for all public libraries.ARobert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

part one

Quick & Dirty
The end of all things is nigh: be ye therefore sober,
and watch unto prayer. And above all things have
fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall
cover the multitude of sins.
-I peter 4:7-8

Time passed. Or at least that's one way to
get from there, my famous mother's infamous summer in
Wales, to here, the ruined house and acreage she used
to call home. "darling," begins a postcard of vine-
draped Tintern Abbey in the moonlight, "as u can see,
despite dr minton's dire warnings, i haven't left
behind what bobby calls my horror vacui. the faces
should be recognizable tho disguised as bees."
Her name was Carole Ridingham even after she
married my father, Robert Rose, or Bobby, as he liked
to be called, the way Napoleon preferred the Little
Corporal. Bobby was the founder and original CEO of
SnowWrite & RoseRead, a powerful man and hot, in the
vernacular, unlike my mother, who eventually swelled
up with the Change and never came back down. But she
was a genius, it didn't matter. As for the faces
(deliriously inked into any leftover space on the
card, front and back), they include Ruth Farr's and
her husband, Coleman's (the Snow of SnowWrite), and
owe a lot to the portraits Blake drew of his friends,
with flea heads, etc., that my mother made a point of
seeing at the Tate while Bobby flirted with
waitresses, and my so-called Aunt Ruth recorded her
every move in her journal, and my so-called Uncle
Coleman snapped photos covertly like a spy. The
women's agendas may have been more overt, but don't
be fooled, the men had agendas too, not the least of
which was to figure out what to do with all the money
they made five years earlier when they sold the
business. Everyone has an agenda, me included, though
we've been repeatedly reminded that the past's off-
limits except to seers. Eyes straight ahead, let the
dead wake the dead, as the saying goes.
The "dire warnings" refer to my mother's
mental condition. At thirteen she was diagnosed
borderline schizophrenic, and was put on drugs that
made her thrust her tongue from her mouth in a way
that looked less like a tongue than a nose,
especially when she was trying to concentrate. My
poor doomed mother-either sailing away from me across
the meadow in her white beekeeping gloves and veil,
in which case I couldn't see the tongue, or painting
in the garden house she used as a studio, in which
case I could but just barely, my view hampered by the
gooseberry bushes outside the window and Bobby, who
usually tried to keep me out. He said he was
protecting her, but we all knew better; he was
keeping her to himself, which I think was how he
thought he could make sure she'd be his forever.
Aside from the tongue, I almost never saw signs of
what was referred to as "inappropriate behavior."
Later we'd have dinner prepared by Mrs. Koop,
our humorless cook, and served by some cute-faced and
inept maid-deluxe treatment even then. A long honey-
colored table polished with beeswax and lit with
beeswax candles, at each place one of the ever so
subtly unmatched Blue Willow plates, and above the
sideboard the plangent reds and golds and deep umbers
of 492. My God: bœuf en daube, mushrooms and pearl
onions, petits pois, crème brûlée. In those days we
ate like kings. Eventually 492 (the number of objects
in the painting) got confiscated along with smaller
and darker 53 that used to hang above my parents'
bed. My mother said I was counting like a bank teller
when I told her I couldn't find more than forty-nine.
I'll never forget the smell in that room: witch
hazel, honey, wet dirt. Out the window the silver
light of the Maine seacoast and on the bed Uncle Tony
sitting with his head in his arms, sobbing. But that
came later.


The idea for the walking tour began with Ruth Farr,
whose urge to follow in the footsteps of the
legendary Manawydan on his journey through Bronze Age
Wales was yet one more doomed attempt to seem as
interestingly compulsive as my mother. Ruth was
always saying things like au fond I'm a dancer or
fashion is my passion with a perfectly straight face,
her idea this time having been to write the kind of
historical novel where fact vanishes in a haze of
myth and romance. A Fall of Mist it was to be called,
or maybe The Fall of Mist, and based on an ancient
tale about Manawydan found in the Mabinogion.
A plan doomed to fail, if ever there was one. Like
you could ever hope to block out your own dull self
and with it the present -- a gang of Strag boys with
measuring cups -- going bang bang bang on your door.
Sometimes four or five of them, sometimes only the
one, banging away in that preposterous dust-caked
wig . . .
Ruth was about the same age as Manawydan when
he made the trip, though he was sent by his father
and ended his days in the Otherworld, while Ruth &
Co. bogged down on the Gower peninsula. Also, while
Manawydan was known as one of the "Three Ungrasping
Chieftains," and took discretion for the better part
of valor, Ruth never had a problem appropriating
someone else's property. Like many weak people, she
was obsessed with the idea of fairness and,
consequently, litigious. Without her, there'd have
been no trial after the disaster at Gower.
According to Ruth's journal, she and Carole
first met in Mrs. Hecht's second-grade class at Henry
Clay Elementary School, where Carole (a new girl and
good at memorizing) got the part of Miss Springtime
even though she was fat and couldn't act, while
string-bean Ruthie (the former apple of Mrs. Hecht's
eye) was stuck playing a worm. Naturally they weren't
friends. Actual friendship, if you could call it
that, came thirty years later, when Carole's good-
looking husband chose Ruth's clever husband to be his
right-hand man, and the next thing Ruth knew she and
Coleman were walking up a long driveway bordered on
both sides by acres and acres of grass, and there was
a large blond woman sloping toward them, at her heels
a dog so tall and with legs so long and thin it
looked like it was going to tip over.
"Heavens," the woman said, "little Ruthie
Farr," but Ruth didn't actually recognize her
childhood nemesis until the dog began to bark, and in
place of a total stranger there was seven-year-old
Carole Ridingham, eyes fierce with apprehension as
Mrs. Hecht handed back the spelling tests. Odd, Mrs.
Hecht remarked, they'd both made exactly the same
mistake. C-A-W-T. You'd almost suspect . . . and she
shook her head, unable to entertain such a sinister
idea.
Meanwhile it was as if no time had passed at
all: Carole and Ruth still couldn't take their eyes
off each other, like serial holders of the same title
vainly trying to figure out what they had in common.
Maybe they were hampered by their jealousy, a key
element under the circumstances. Nicest looks? Most
famous? Best husband?
In those days Ruth did everything she could
to play up her naturally snow white skin, ebony black
hair, and blood red lips. Women wanted to look like
dead young girls; it was the style, meaning another
way to put Death on the wrong track. I remember being
afraid of her, particularly a large beauty mark on
her upper lip that I mistook for a bee, and I
remember the frail hippie gardener doing a trick with
a hollyhock to calm me down. The glowing pond, the
humming bee boxes, the thrillingly insane smell of
heliotrope. Out on what my mother called the piazza,
in the good old summertime.
That's where they met up with Bobby. He stuck
a drink in Coleman's hand and said there was more on
the way. No one smoked; a drink was the best you
could hope for after having been forced to watch your
husband's jaw drop open at the sight of the girl you
thought you'd seen the last of years ago, when her
parents mercifully shipped her off to boarding
school. Pudgy Carole Ridingham had turned into the
kind of woman men put on a pedestal, though I'm sure
it was less to worship than to observe safely from a
distance.
"Cawing crows," Ruth wrote, "drifted through
the vapid blue like cinders from the furnace of my
jealous heart." Except really there was no cause for
jealousy. What interested Uncle Coleman in my mother
never had anything to do with sex; it had to do with
power. He knew that if he could win my mother, he
could win anything.
That was her talent, to make people feel that
way -- I should know.
But "vapid"? Ruth must have been thinking of
someplace else.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Kathryn Davis. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395945410
• ISBN 13: 9780395945414
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264