Joyland: A Novel [Hardcover]

In the fictional town of South Wakefield (pop. 9000), in the rustbelt of southern Ontario, there isn’t much for tweenies and teenagers to do, especially in the hot, dry summer of 1984, and especially when Joyland, the local video arcade, is being closed forever. The loss of the landmark is particularly devastating for hardcore player, fourten-year-old Chris Lane and his almost-twelve-year-old, entry level player sister, Tammy. For Toronto author Emily Schultz, the summertime closing of the video arcade serves as a perfect starting point for creating what may be considered a classic coming-of-age story rich in allusions derived from video games of the 1980s.
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)

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.