Review
Each chapter of the book is designed as a Level from 1 to 13, named after some of the most popular of the early games. The chapters proceed from Galaga to Frogger to Galaxian, then to Donkey Kong and Berzerk, with a final level as a Bonus. Within each Level, Schultz tells the youngsters’ stories from the alternating viewpoints of experienced Player 1 (Chris) and beginner Player 2 (Tammy). Aside from the ingenuous use of games to structure the story, it is Schultz’s masterful storytelling at every Level that makes her novel extraordinary and her protagonists, Chris, and especially Tammy, truly memorable.
For Chris, South Wakefield is a masculine place where macho players exhibit their skills playing games like Dig Dug, fantasize with a supermodel’s poster while masturbating, cover up their shyness with bravado, brag to best buds about game scores, pool pennies and dollar bills to buy bootlegger’s booze, and experiment with sex. Chris, to his misfortune, gets caught seducing a girlfriend in the bed of his best friend’s brother. He catches Chris and the girl while they’re at it, and degrades Chris by rubbing his own semen into his face before sending him packing. In retaliation, Chris concocts a plan to zap the monster that attacked him. But as in all kinds of games, both in and outside of arcades, monsters don’t take kindly to being ambushed and can and do react with murderous fury.
While Chris does his teenage things, tweenie Tammy plays her games too, at home on her Atari, on a hockey stick horse in the neighbourhood, and on her bicycle around town. Hers is the youthful female viewpoint, innocent and naive. She attacks her hymen to accelerate the onset of her first period. She also admires her brother with some ambivalence, keeps her eyes open for signs of a break-up between her parents, is sensitive to the slights of friends, and curious about “S-E-X”. One of her favourite games is acting like “Harriett the spy,” hiding in trees and bushes while ogling teenaged neighbours making out by a swimming pool, or surreptitiously cycling through town tracking an individual she has dubbed “The Rabbit”. In a couple of particularly tense instances she plays with fire, coming very close to awakening the monsters of perversion in the form of a neighbourhood waterbed salesman and a weird hothead who figures prominently in Chris’s fatally flawed plan for revenge.
Whatever the Chris and Tammy do, and whomever they interact with virtually or in real life, Schultz makes the event an absorbing experience. The settings are meticulously presented, whether it’s a breakfast table with a milk carton and its text, or newspaper references to events of the day, or a police station, or the descriptions of game features, or of the backyard of the boarded up Joyland where Chris’s crowd hang out beneath the fading wall-sized mural of the Rolling Stones logo. The body language between the brother and sister during moments of intimacy speaks as eloquently as any words, and their concern for each other is evident in the text and subtext of their conversations. Nate Powell’s several strategically placed black and white sketches ideally suit the nostalgic tone, atmosphere, and setting of a book that is a joyful, compelling read at every level.
M. Wayne Cunningham (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
Welcome to 1984 and the town of South Wakefield. Chris Lane is 14 and he’s sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what’s inside of Christie Brinkley’s mind. But he can't foresee the closing of Joyland, the town’s only video arcade. With the arcade’s passing comes a summer of teenage lust, violence, and a search for new entertainment. Never far away is Chris’s younger sister, Tammy, who plays spy to the events that will change the lives of her family and town forever. Joyland is a novel about the impossibility of knowing the future. Schultz brings the Cold War home in a novel set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal. Joyland is illustrated throughout by graphic novelist Nate Powell, whose work has been praised by Sin City creator Frank Miller as “observant, intimate cartooning [that] surgically cuts to the bone.”
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
That summer, Tammy Lane was brave enough and strong enough to reach the very top of the maple tree in her backyard. From there, she could see the cars on St. Lawrence Street shooting past. She could see her brother flying away down the sidewalk on his bmx. She could see him flying away from her, away from everything she had ever known. Tammy watched afternoon lapse into evening and waited for him to come home.
Chris zigzagged through the grocery store parking lot, his butt in the air as the front tire cleared the curb and dropped him into the street. He disappeared through the branches. According to Tammy’s Big Book of Spy Terms, he was “in the gap.” When he reappeared, he was at the corner near the donut shop. Tammy lost him then — longer, “in the black” — and when she spotted him once more, he had doubled back through the grocery lot, riding hard and quick with his head down. Tammy pulled herself up by a branch she didn’t trust, crooked her body onto a side bough that bent away from the trunk — at an alarming angle. The branch had been cut off and had veered, growing at a ninety degree angle from its sacrifice point, though not during Tammy’s lifetime. She held tight, looking down, a thirty yard drop. She glanced back up just in time to catch Chris dodge into the string of back lots of the businesses on St. Lawrence.
Parallel, she located them: three shapes moving in the stretch in front of the donut shop. Bright blue track jackets and yellow hair bands. Girls.
To Tammy’s knowledge her brother had only six fears. One, their father (though Tammy couldn’t begin to fathom why). Two, J.P.’s older brother, who terrorized them on occasion (the same way J.P. and Chris liked to terrorize Tammy). Three, classical music (or anything other than hard rock and metal). Four, visiting their grandfather, but only because it meant being away from Joyland for days at a time (days, Chris said, that would make him “a total amateur again”). Five, ostriches (because he was once bitten while visiting an animal safari during family vacation). Six, clowns (due to too many viewings of the movie Poltergeist).
To this list, Tammy added number seven. Girls (an undiscriminating category including nearly all, except her).
Fears numbers three and four probably didn’t count. Still, Tammy left them in. Chris’s seven fears were a thumb–sized wedge in the pie graph compared to all of hers. The Seven Fears. Like the seven dwarves, fears were real and respiring, each with its own distinct personality.
She pressed chin against branch and let her lips trail over the grey, leaving a wide wet mark, the kiss of the bark on her lips like a hard, scarred thing. She dropped her forehead to the branch and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Chris and the girls were both long gone. Tammy swung from one limb to another, carefully, letting her body hover in the space between just a fraction of a second longer than needed to obtain the exhilaration of floating.
