Quarantine, protests for justice, important progressive and responsive legislation passing: we are experiencing a necessary sea change. I personally hope we see it through in a meaningful way. I keep feeling pleasantly surprised. I hope the momentum keeps up. It is still a weird time to read, and for me, there’s something about the length of a novella that is perfect right now. You get to escape into a fantasy world for a satisfyingly long time, but you are still coming back to the real world in time to not miss the important moments.
So I have another novella recommendation for you: Engines Beneath Us by Malcom Devlin, another great one from TTA Press.
Thirteen-year-old Robert lives in The Crescent, a housing development for the employees of The City Works and their families. When the children come of age at sixteen, they are apprenticed to Mr. Olhouser, who is in charge of The Works. The Works keeps the city running, but outsiders know to avoid The Crescent and its inhabitants.
“We were only doing what every other kid in the city was doing. In every street, on every green, the same games were being played, the same dramas unfolded, but even so, The Crescent had a bit of a reputation back then. It was one of those parts of the city that people were wary of. You probably know the type. It was as though people believed it was the source of everything terrible that happened in the area. You’d sometimes see people stumble in by mistake, only to beat a hasty retreat when we all looked up from what we were doing at the time. I never really understood what they saw: something bleak, something violent, the fulcrum for all the city’s ills.”
One thing I really love about the telling of this story is that Robert is an insider and a kid who doesn’t realize that he lives somewhere strange. Things that are strange to outsiders are normal to Robert, and his obliviousness to his surroundings gives the novella its tension. The Crescent is Robert’s world, and even though The Works are a bit of a mystery to him, he knows he will soon find out, so he doesn’t really wonder about it. It’s just the place his dad goes to work, the place Robert will someday work even though he has bigger dreams.
“You could feel the deep bass thrum of The Works when you were out on the grass, you could feel the distant, buried boom-boom-boom of it when you put your head to your pillow at night. It was always there, and it was ours. That was why we were mostly left to our own devices. We had the city on our side.”
When Lee and his father move to town, Robert befriends him despite the warnings of his peers and his dad.
“‘Give that kid a wide berth,’ he said. ‘He’s got trouble all backed up behind him, he only needs miss a step once for it all to come crashing down on him and whoever he’s dragged along.’ ”
There is real love in this friendship, and I particularly like reading that in this time of questioning masculinity and our relationships. Lee and Robert take up shoplifting and use a combination of suspicion and privilege against the shopkeepers. While they constantly surveil Robert—his Crescent-ness is always obvious to outsiders—Lee steals comics, books, CDs, and beers.
“It was never really about what we took, and instead I began to consider it some kind of payback, and the exhilaration of it bred a sense of punchdrunk entitlement. I’d think of the way the shopkeepers had looked at me, that look of wary distaste when they saw who’d come in. Look at me like that, I thought, and you deserve everything you get.”
From what I can tell, these are all white kids. Even still, they are experiencing otherness because of their status and class. This strikes me as a pretty good way to explore the consequences of othering while heeding the call from writers of color for white writers to stay in our lane. I think Devlin does this well and tells this story so beautifully.
I don’t want to give too much of the book away, but this book has administrative corruption, teenage boy friendship, a twisted insular community, a supernatural mystery that is unremarkable to our narrator, and the claustrophobia of a life that feels predetermined by poverty and circumstance. It reminds me a little of the Wool series and one of Laura Mauro’s short stories (I don’t want to say which one because it would be a spoiler), and a little bit of Zola’s Germinal (if there was something supernatural happening). In general, it seems like you can’t go wrong with TTA Press Novellas. You can buy them individually or in a set. Engines Beneath Us is available now.
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