Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
But too many of the sad and scary things happened outside Doug's direct experience, and we don't get his POV. What does Lavinia's scary walk home have to do with Doug? What does the Elmira-Clara witchcraft story have to do with Doug? What do the details of the deaths of the old people and the Helen-Bill "romance" have to do with Doug? What does the Happiness Machine have to do with Doug? Sometimes he's not even an observer, let alone a participant.
I don't think it's enough to string together a bunch of short stories and call it a novel; the episodes needed to be unified/reconciled in some way or else should simply have been published as an anthology.
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From the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to Doug's overseeing eye, as he stands in his cupola and starts the town going on the morning of the first day of summer, just as he'll close it down at the end. I thought this an effective framing device which gave the vignettes sufficient structure.
I also thought the third person voice was sufficient to account for the events outside of Doug's or Tom's direct knowledge and at least one of them was always tangential. Some of those gave context to Doug's individual experiences and emotions and gave direct evidence of the darker side that Doug didn't see or understand yet, the reason such an unromantic town as Waukegan lives in his memory as Green Town.