AT THE END OF EACH DAYby Arianna Reiche
An amusement park is a dizzying operation. A huge campus, a long list of employees, an extraordinary logistics enterprise, all organized in the perfection of an illusion: here, beyond the miles of parking lots and through the gates, lies a more ideal version of reality than the one you’ve left behind .
It’s really shocking that more writers haven’t set stories in these complicated, adventurous environments, as Arianna Reiche did in her debut novel ‘At the End of Each Day’. The most important preliminary example must be George Saunders’ masterful, bizarre collection of short stories, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” Where Saunders was most interested in satirizing the American instinct to celebrate and purify the past, “At the End of Every Day” evokes the psychic relationships humans have with these constructed realities – places like Disneyland may be designed for ‘escape’, but we always take our baggage with us.
What haunts Delphi Baxter, the book’s tenacious but confused heroine, is a mysterious childhood accident that has literally and figuratively left her deeply scarred. After several quirky years, Delphi has found purpose and community in an unnamed California theme park that resembles a dark comedy version of Disney: One attraction instantly evokes Peter Pan’s Flight, but another, called CoasterTown Blast, is “a strange, clumsy animated homage to 1976’s ‘Chinatown’.”
At the beginning of the novel, Delphi and her handsome prince-charming-level boyfriend, Brendan, help wind down the park’s operations. “The park seemed invincible for a long time,” Delphi thinks. “It was an essential spinal fluid of America.” But now, following the public death of an underage starlet during a lagoon ride in Nebulaland, it’s shutting down, with the company’s focus shifting to the Hong Kong offshoot of the park. The closure means the loss of Delphi’s home and community, but she stoically continues to destroy what she loves most – until a few encounters with unusual figures cloud her understanding of what is really happening. She and the reader will spend many chapters roaming the park, from Springtime Canyon to the Chirakan Caves, searching for the truth not only about the park’s closure, but its creation long ago.
Through all her pop culture references and sci-fi filigree, Reiche maintains a charming prose style. I circled many deft sentences as I read, from her description of the opening scene, which notes “the faint fingerprint of a moon in daylight,” to her characterization of a certain kind of affluent California town where “fathers grew ponytails and tried small vineyards.” to cultivate on brown, crusty mounds.” The Other Big Achievement Of “At The End Of Each Day” is the extraordinary creative scope: we are taken to a desert campus called Imagination Ranch, where the park’s robot engineers toil, and we meet an unholy church of actors whose likenesses have been used in park attractions. There’s a long epistolary sub-story about a brother and sister struggling to connect, which slowly reveals their relationship with the theme park. There’s even, towards the end, the whisper of the supernatural.
But one danger of including so many elements, especially those elusive or weird or purposefully obscure, is that it strains the reader’s ability to satisfactorily follow what’s going on, which undermines our interest in and concern for Delphi. threatens to decrease. The skewness of the story is, in part, a reflection of Delphi’s own lostness. She cannot help readers understand what she herself does not understand. But sometimes the novel just rambles down side streets with backstories – like the story of Brendan’s teenage years and how he chose to become an actor – that serve our investment in the main event badly.
Late in the story, Delphi descends into the bowels of the park, where she encounters a leprechaun figure. “Would you…tell me something?” begs Delphi. “It’s just been a long time since I understood anything.” At that moment, despite all of Reiche’s enormous gifts, the reader may feel the same way.
Ben H. Winters’ books have won the Edgar Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. He is the most recent author of ‘The Quiet Boy’.
AT THE END OF EACH DAY | By Arianna Reiche | 258 pp. | Atria Books | $27.99