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Scott Dimovitz
The Joy Divisions
A Novel
Well, what's your plan to save the world?
The year is 1993, and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned home to work as a janitor in Allentown, Pennsylvania—the enigmatic nexus where goth kids, coffeeshop culture, and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis, the dying textiles industry, and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art, post-NAFTA labor battles, and burning factories, their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical, Scott Dimovitz’s grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.
The Joy Divisions
A Novel
Well, what's your plan to save the world?
The year is 1993, and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned to his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania—the enigmatic nexus where goth kids, coffeeshop culture, and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis, the dying textiles industry, and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art, post-NAFTA labor battles, and burning factories, their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical, Scott Dimovitz’s grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.
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"Dimovitz paints a fascinating tableau of an ailing blue-collar town, one beleaguered by the pressures of globalization and competition yet possessed of a thriving … cultural underground." — Kirkus Reviews
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"An intense portrayal of personal evolution in contemporary life, The Joy Divisions, offers an immersive literary jaunt back to a time and place where drugs, angst, history, art, music, literature, blue collar woes, and consciousness cult idealism, intersect through surprising events ..." — BestSellersWorld.com
Scott Dimovitz received his Ph.D. in modern and postmodern literature from NYU, and he has taught writing and contemporary literature for many years at NYU and Regis University in Denver, CO, where he is a professor of English. He has written extensively on writers such as David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Alison Bechdel, and Paul Auster, and he has published over a dozen literary essays in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, C21: Journal of 21st Century Writings, and Contemporary Women's Writing. He now lives in Denver, CO among piles of books, guitars, and many half-graded student essays.
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The Joy Divisions is wholly, breathtakingly new. Allentown, Pennsylvania becomes a character in this marvelous debut novel about labor, family, faith, art, and desire. Dimovitz shines in his attention to setting—particularly, his stunning ability to connect the history of places to the lives of his characters. The novel raises compelling philosophical questions in a delightfully unique voice and form, with some truly hilarious, incisive jabs about the art world. At the heart of this book lies an urgent search for meaning in an unstable time—a profoundly human question, and one on which Dimovitz has great wisdom to offer.
Alyse Knorr
Author of Ardor
