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Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Diane DeSanders 9781942658368 Books

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Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Diane DeSanders 9781942658368 Books

This story is narrated by a curious, imaginative, spirited, insightful 7-year-old who is trying to navigate her world amongst her eccentric and damaged family in post-WWII Dallas, Texas. The plot is developmental, and anyone interested in psychology, child development, historical familial narratives and how that affects generations will enjoy this story. It also happens to be beautifully written; very visual, and full of characters - big and small.


Tags : Hap and Hazard and the End of the World [Diane DeSanders] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Diane DeSanders's genius lies in her ability to capture the intimate interiority of a very particular childhood while at the same time interrogating larger questions of class,Diane DeSanders,Hap and Hazard and the End of the World,Bellevue Literary Press,1942658362,Coming Of Age,Historical,Literary,Bildungsromans,Domestic fiction,Domestic fiction.,Dysfunctional families,Dysfunctional families;Fiction.,FICTION Family Life,FICTION Historical,FICTION Literary.,AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION,FICTION Coming of Age,FICTION Family Life General,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction-Coming of Age,FictionComing of Age,FictionFamily Life - General,FictionHistorical - General,GENERAL,General Adult,Texas,United States

Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Diane DeSanders 9781942658368 Books Reviews

I received this book for free through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers.

I liked this book but I didn’t love it. The book consists of little vignettes from the narrator’s life. Most of them centered on the same things her father and his rage, her relationship with her mother, her grandparents, her next door neighbor Nathan. There wasn’t much of a plot. I got halfway through and the plot seemed to be exactly where it was when I started. It was basically things happening, all slowly leading up to the loss of childhood innocence.

Overall, the book didn’t strike me as anything particularly special, but I did enjoy it reading it.
While being about one girl in Texas during the American boom of the post-war era, this book captures the larger American experience of material prosperity and class hiding ingrained dysfunction and drama behind the superficial ease. I would recommend this book both the readers who want to remember the details of this time, or learn about them. This is a three-dimensional immersion in a different time seen and experienced through the eyes of a child.
LITERARY FICTION
Diane DeSanders
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World A Novel
Bellevue Literary Press
Paperback, 978-1-9426-5836-8 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $16.99
January 9, 2018

Dick and Jane are well off, living with their three daughters in late 1940s Dallas when there were still cows and cotton fields out Preston Road. There are maids, cooks, yardmen, shopping at Neiman’s, dining at the Adolphus, and garden parties where the women are “talking chummily yet guardedly together out on the patio with their beautiful clothes and their diamond-cut ankles, sleek birds circling, feathers out.”

But Dick returned injured and broken from World War II. He’s in constant pain that mixes into an unstable compound with humiliation and frustration at his disfavored status at his father’s car dealership, Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac, where he plays second to his brother. Dick explodes frequently and violently at “intolerable imperfections,” terrorizing his family, friends, pets, strangers, and inanimate objects.

The story is told through the first-person narration of the oldest daughter, seven years old, an anxious, imaginative child, adrift, neglected and lonely, confused by the grown-ups whom she should be able to trust to protect her. “If only I could have a big brother or even a big sister,” she laments, “someone older, or just someone—I need someone—who will tell me at least what it is that we are pretending.”

Hap and Hazard and the End of the World A Novel is Diane DeSanders’s first book. DeSanders is a fifth-generation Texan who inexplicably lives in Brooklyn, New York. Happily, her Texan bona fides are on ample display in this charming yet heart-wrenching debut about a single tumultuous, pivotal year in the life of a young girl.

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The author’s choice of Dick and Jane for the parents’ names tells us that this unhappy family is not unusual, is in fact typical in the fact of their unhappiness, but the details are important, as is the fact that the child narrator remains nameless.

She relates vignettes representative of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this coming-of-age year, full of pathos in the partial understanding and magical thinking of a child. She desperately wants to believe, to have faith, in all sorts of things—God, Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, the adults she must depend upon—but her inquisitive mind demands proof. “I think some stories are real and some are not,” she thinks, “but grown-ups do not seem to want to tell you which are which.”

DeSanders’s word choices are precise, her style fluid, her imagery frequently delightful, as when Aunt Celeste shuffles cards for bridge, “her fingers dancers, the cards acrobats.” The child who narrates her world is sometimes daydreaming, sometimes caught in the rain (“I run out, climb the slippery wooden fence, run, slip on wet grass, fall down, get up, run, run, run”). She negotiates high-stakes playground politics (“a contest as vicious as that in any chicken yard”). Other times she’s sweetly comic “I’d recently realized grown-ups don’t know what you’re doing if they’re not looking at you,” she tells us. “Although you have to watch out for the sides of their eyes.”

This is not a romanticized version of childhood, though the conclusion is pitch-perfect. This is a girl discovering cause and effect, exploring boundaries, feeling for the shape of her life, like the bullfrog trapped in their backyard swimming pool, “ranging the shape and size of the pool, being the shape and size of the pool, forgetting that there was ever anything else but the shape and size of the pool.”

“How much more they might accomplish if only they could talk to each other.” DeSanders quotes Jane Goodall in an epigraph opposite her author’s note. Goodall was talking about chimpanzees, but the sentiment is aptly chosen for DeSanders’s characters, a nuclear family in perpetual danger of fission.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World by Diane DeSanders is about a young girl with a dysfunctional family living in Dallas, Texas, after WWII.

An unnamed child is the narrator of these short interconnected sketches. She misses the time when she was the only child living with her mother while her father was away, in the War. Now her father is always angry, easily provoked into rages, and is in constant pain from his wounded, deformed feet. He likes to have everything a certain way, or he will fly into a violent temper tantrum. Her mother seems preoccupied and is often sad now. she is no longer the fun, carefree mother she used to be. She is busy with social events. She also cares more about the two new babies now and our narrator is left to deal with her questions on her own. And she has many questions that adults don't seem to want to answer, like is Santa real?

There are several heart breaking, poignant moments when you read this, as an adult, and see how the anger and complexities of her parent's relationship is deeply affecting this young girl. It also captures a time in history, America after WWII. The questions the girl has are question most children have. She struggles with school and making friends. She's trying to make sense of her world and some of the problems she has that she can't talk to anyone about. Her father, due to his injuries, is constantly described as clump-CLUMPing here and there, knocking things over or off tables, in an angry reaction, while her mother is tense, waiting for the next explosion.

This well-written series of vignettes works on some levels, but not completely for me. The sketches are presented in a nonlinear story line, although they do eventually culminate in a story and a more complete picture of a traumatic event. Our narrator often repeats the same concerns and questions, reflects on the same things, which makes sense for a child, but I'm not sure that I want to read the same thing repeatedly as an adult, especially with run-on sentences in a stream-of-consciousness style.

DeSanders does capture the questions and innocence of childhood in a dysfunctional family, but misses the mark not naming her narrator. Names are very important to children, especially their own names, even when all they are thinking about is are the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus real? Or why do you like the babies more than me? Or why do boys play the way they do? Certainly a parent would call out her full name at least once or twice. Sometimes an unnamed character is representative of an every-man, a common character, but our narrator is a specific child, and a child curious enough to want to know why she was named the name she was and to let us know who she is.

Disclosure My review copy was courtesy of Bellevue Literary Press.
Our Cousin wrote this enjoyable book about family life in the 40' and 50's...interesting read
This story is narrated by a curious, imaginative, spirited, insightful 7-year-old who is trying to navigate her world amongst her eccentric and damaged family in post-WWII Dallas, Texas. The plot is developmental, and anyone interested in psychology, child development, historical familial narratives and how that affects generations will enjoy this story. It also happens to be beautifully written; very visual, and full of characters - big and small.