Made to Break

by D. Foy

Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They've been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.

After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions, considering what they mean to one another and to themselves.

With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño.

Genres: Fiction, American, Contemporary, Novels

242 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2014

About the author

D. Foy is the author of the novels Made to Break, Patricide, and Absolutely Golden. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, and the Georgia Review, among many others, and have been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. Visit him at dfoyble.com.

Reviews

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, harrowing account of a series of friendships imploding, even as the landscape around the main characters slowly betrays them. Deeply tense at times; also, the ways in which Foy captures his characters feeling stranded in their mid-30s hit very close to home.
[Even better on a second read, I found.]

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 2/08/14 - 2/14/14
3 Stars - Recommended to those who remember what it was like to be wild and free and careless with other people's lives
217 Pages
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Releases: March 2014


The first thing you notice is the way in which D. Foy manipulates language. He pulls it taught then lets it go, snapping it to and fro, filling the pages with words in fits and bursts; tensing things up and slowing things down with his hypnotic prose.

The second thing you notice is that Andrew, our narrator, and the four friends he is planning on hanging with at a secluded cabin in Lake Tahoe, are all completely out of their gords. Drugs, drink, sex, and a storm-to-end-all-storms set the stage for this story, and the set up is sure to put you in mind of certain b-level thrillers.

After a quick trip out for ice ends in an unfortunate car accident, leaving one of group sick and dying, the storm floods the roads around them trapping them tight. As the fivesome kill the time by passing around the hooch and playing a round of Truth or Dare, their paranoia, past histories, and Dinky's quickly failing health threaten to turn what should have been a relaxing New Year's vacation into a full out waking nightmare.

Unlike most of your typical B-level thrillers, though, there are no monsters or madmen lurking in the shadows here, unless you consider the passerby Super and his dog Fortinbras mad. Instead, this group of 30-something burnouts work at each other relentlessly, while taking turns watching over their ill buddy, racing out into the pouring rain and wandering through the wooded trails seeking help, hoping for a break in the bad weather by which they might get him to a hospital.

If wearing out your welcome and driving your friends nutty is your bag, and if being careless with other people's lives provides you with hilarious fodder, this book was written for you.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn't for everyone. It's subject is raw and the language is exuberant to the point of deliriousness. Every sentence goes right to the edge. Sometimes it slips over the top. Sometimes it doesn't quite make it, but damn if D Foy isn't going for it. It's like a postmodern mash-up of Hamsun, Tarantino and Kerouac. The dialog is deliberately overwrought. Its excesses are excessive, but Made to Break really got its hooks into me and didn't let go to the last page. What else do you want out of a book?

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do we ever really grow up or do we merely grow old, tired, and fearful of the possibility that our best experiences may have already passed?

[LitReactor]

Ah, the 90s, it was a magical time. The music, the movies, the art (I would include the literature, but, meh), the crazed culture, the star crossed duality of hopeful optimism and biter irony. And, of course, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs. (Can you guess what my favorite part of the 90's was?) Long story short, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but who really gives a shit, who’s got the molly? You do? Fuck, come here, man, you’re my best friend! You know that right? What was your name again?

Yeah, folks, the 90s were kind of a vacuous lump in history. Yes, there were tons of great things that came out of the decade, but for the most part it was all surface with very little substance, with an undercurrent of malice and self-loathing lurking that we all somehow mistook for irony.

This malice is, for me, the core of D. Foy’s debut novel. The group of friends trapped in their tiny Northern Californian cabin all share time and space with one another—most have been friends for a decade—but while reading you can’t help but think that none of them would give a second thought to washing their hands and starting life anew with a shiny set of uncontaminated pals. You guessed it, none of these folks are in the least bit likable or ellicit the slightest bit of empathy from the reader. But does this mean they don’t make for engaging characters? Absolutely not. These hot messes of bruised, malicious assholery keep you turning pages just so you can see their fragile egos shatter into a million pieces.

Like the last four Two-Dollar Radio titles I’ve read, Made to Break has the pacing of a breakneck drugstore thriller and doesn’t cling to any single genre. It plays around the edges of gothic horror and locked room mystery. Foy has a poets gift, blending the everyday with surrealist prose, but not so surreal that he loses the readers attention. Overall, Made to Break is an entertaining, at times artful piece of pulp trash (and I mean pulp trash in the most complimentary way) that will leave the reader spinning.

--

Review by Keith Rawson

Check out more from this review at LitReactor (http://litreactor.com/reviews/booksho...)!

[Kristin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to stop reading this book at page 50, I hated it THAT much. Reading this book felt like attending a party of drunk, stoned soldiers, who are SO drunk that eighty percent of what they're saying doesn't make any sense. And, yes, you're stone cold sober, so you're stuck listening to them and are bored out of your mind. Given the high reviews for this book, I'm willing to admit that it might (?) get better the further you get in the book. But 50 pages in, I hate the characters. The story line itself doesn't make any sense at all (i.e. a main character gets hurt, ostensibly, in a car accident, but the accident is so lightly detailed you have no idea what happened, how he's hurt, how badly, etc.). And, to be honest, when you CAN understand the characters, their conversational exchanges are so disgusting and foul that, as a reader, I felt like I was being dragged through the slime in a sewer. Some readers might be willing to wade through muck to get to a great ending (even assuming that the book gets better and has a good ending). But I couldn't take any more. The book contains such fascinating conversational topics such as: flicking boogers, coloring dicks with permanent markers while men sleep, and bent dicks. Your cup of tea? Then let me add a little more detail. One conversational topic before page 50: "When I was a kid I had a stuffed monkey... It had this hole in its crotch. It started out small, but kept getting bigger. So I f---ed it." And then his friend says, "I'll bet you even crammed the thing full of mayonnaise before you did it." Now, given the untold number of brilliant books available to a read, is THIS what you want to spend your time reading? Yuck.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I would never ever do is go to a cabin with friends - good or best friends, I just wouldn't do it. I think this novel confirms my fears, and will for sure only stay in hotels with a 24 hour lobby and vending machines that are open all day and night. But I will read books about people who do decide to spend time together, and being stranded in bad weather, with a friend that is dying, well.... One takes stock in their lives, and this is very much of a novel about time passing. Or more likely change. D. Foy is an excellent prose writer, and I'm thankful that there are presses out there, like Two Dollar Radio, that captures writers like Foy on the page, and therefore to my hands.

[Mark Dickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I somewhat enjoyed reading this book, I can't, for the life of me, understand what it exists. Some might find the prose "exciting", but there are thousands of writers with the same voice but far more interesting, relevant, or engaging stories.

I could not have cared less about the outcome of this book. It was a slow-motion train wreck (which may sound kind of appealing), but the train is empty and is in the middle of nowhere. It's kind of hypnotic to watch, but it's just a diversion, and not nearly as enjoyable as the countless other diversions available.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like to think I'm not a quitter. If I start a TV series or a movie and discover I'm not a fan of it, I'll still finish it for the sake of not giving up halfway through. I couldn't do that with this book. Nothing makes sense, plot lines jump, characters say something and it's later attributed to another character. I hate to think that I'm missing out on a good book because it seemed to have potential. But I just can't follow it.

[Jessica J.]

I looked into this and decided it probably wouldn't be up my alley, but I found it curious that the marketing copy here on Goodreads describes it as having "some of the most purple prose in recent memory" as though that were a good thing. Does that strike anyone else as a strange marketing ploy?

[Dottie B · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a real shame. A shame! What kind of mother names her child a letter? Not a good one! D? My friend's daughter is lazy as heck (she works at the subway) and she at least named her son Tom. Not Thomas. Tom. That's only two more letters but at least it's a NAME. Ok, well I'm off to bed, interested in what you all think though! Go buckeyes!

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a great moment where the narrator compares all humanity to worms in mud that perfectly encapsulates a book about bearing down until we reveal who and what are most essential to us. The prose is fantastic and the condensed narrative very effective. A very appropriate read to begin a new year. Also a great meditation on friendship, and the language as well as mythology that attends it

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novel coming in March. Some words about it coming sooner. You'll want to check this out.

[Kris V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very overdue review to be completed and posted quite soon.

[Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go Buckeyes!

[Julia Lasalle · Rating 3 out of 5]

With an ironic wink, a dog-eared copy of On the Road shows up in the first several pages, telling us we are in for drunk, stoned, whacked-out, dark, dirty road trip book. In other words: Man-fiction. That's not an insult.

In D.Foy’s Made to Break, we've got a bunch of old friends, who started out as adventures, but now, in the throes of a quarter life crisis are turning corporate, returning from infantry tours, and finding that, in order to survive, their thirties better shape up a helluva a lot differently than their twenties.

It’s a recognizable point in life, if you make it to middle age and can look back with some equanimity. It’s the point where a decade of drinking in excess turns the corner from good stories, self-indulgence, romance and adventure to a path more sinister, ranging from the basic mean drunk to the terrifying, self-destructive, and murderous.

D. Foy scopes out that terrain with gristly prose, - about as far from chic-lit as one can get. Dark. Dark. Almost noir-ish (though he himself calls it gutter-opera) with metaphors and humor that might make you laugh around the nails your biting. Here’s an example, that I may never ever forget: ‘with a mouth like an earwig.’

He traps four detestable characters, old friends, old enemies, in a cabin in a rain-storm with one man seriously injured and all seriously close to injuring each other. These characters have long-histories, and love quad-angles, interwined with love and drugs, and no way to escape the knowledge the others have of themselves, and, in the driving rain, no way to escape each other.
It’s Lord of the Flies, but in the Rockies, and also, with grown-ups -- grown-ups that have seen some things and done some things, but who haven’t figured out how to be grown-up yet, and understand what their actions and words can mean.

With each page you are wondering which little Piggy will end up with his head smashed on the rocks, and why it is you can’t stop reading about these people that you hate.

Made to Break is the debut novel by D. Foy, brought to us by the good good people at Two Dollar Radio Press, based in Columbus, Ohio. They describe the book as Nick Cave + Big Chill + Hunter S. Thompson. Who actually can resist a formula like that?

[Edward Stafford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two and a half stars maybe? I'm not mad, just disappointed. There's a lot of promise in the prose, but the skeleton of a story is so anemic that it's barely there. In fact, I'm not even sure you can really call it a story. But that's OK. I don't need a plot, but I do need something besides a hazy 90s dive bar losercore cast of dumbfucks playing truth or dare when they're not busy making bad decisions. I'm not entirely sure why the spooky-kooky grandpa character was even there other than to impart some Hunter Thompson/Tom Waits-sounding barfly wisdom on these ne'erdowells. This could have been something, but needed some workshopping. The ending is eyerollingly lame.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really disliked the writing style of this book - full of cliched sayings and juvenile vibes or references meant to seem cool? On top of that, the story seemed liked it was supposed to be revelatory about innate character among friends in crisis, but I didn't feel like I had a good sense of any of the characters, particularly the women.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting excursion to the past of "constant obsolescence" ideas and goods that created on idea "use it and toss it". Nothing new for all the people who's interested in this material but really good point to start how we came to the situation we have.

[Derek Harmening · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Review originally published by Curbside Splendor*

Everyone craves friendship; it's a necessary, validating component of the interactive human experience. Yet friendships can transform into defense mechanisms. At times we steep ourselves in one another's failures and shortcomings to numb the reality of our own. It's like spending five years at that bogus retail job you've hated but couldn't leave, for to do so would be an acknowledgement of discontent and a betrayal of your fellow sufferers.

D. Foy amplifies the idea in Made to Break, a self-styled "gutter opera" about five thirtysomething friends who've unwittingly reached the frayed rope's end of their lives together. Lucille has just landed a corporate job. In one last hurrah, she's spending a booze-drenched New Years' Eve weekend in Lake Tahoe with Dinky, Hickory, Basil, and Andrew. There's something portentous about the dead caged bird stinking up Dinky's family cabin upon arrival. Weather forecasts warn of an impending flood; the phone lines are kaput; a ride into town for supplies turns south when Dinky and Andrew wreck their truck, leaving Dinky sick and dying.

What starts as an innocuous game of Truth or Dare, intended to pass time until the storm lifts and help can arrive, becomes a stage for accusations, revelations, and long-buried truths rippling just beneath a tumultuous surface. Andrew narrates the proceedings, revealing over time a dysfunctional romantic triangle among Lucille, Dinky, and Basil, as well as his own infatuation with Hickory. Stories of their pasts commingle with the present, and one by one Andrew explains how they've all been failed—by their parents, by each other—and have grown to echo those failures.

Basil, for instance, is an aging musician unable to accept his lack of relevance. Ever since looking into Paul Stanley's eyes and catching his guitar pick at a '75 show, Basil has wanted to be a rock deity. Instead, he's "trapped in this limbo of grey," still haunted by his father's abandonment. Andrew's booze-and-drug-addled haze is the direct result of having lost both his grandparents and his own father at an early age. Hickory recalls being sent home as a child following a bomb threat on her elementary school, only to walk in on her mother in the midst of an affair. Lucille's well-known promiscuity comes to a sharpened point while working as a receptionist, not only fielding but encouraging the calls of a troubled man seeking phone sex. Each is stricken by these memories, the disintegration of their idealized selves.

"I wanted so badly to make up for all I'd done and been," Andrew confides. "But first I had to make myself, whoever that was, happy, whole, something. How I was to accomplish that, though, redeem myself, when that redemption hinged on so many needs, some impossible giving away of self, only doom could say."

D. Foy's prose fizzes and crackles throughout, a reckless, speeding car with bits of Hunter Thompson, Kerouac, and Pynchon splattered on the windshield. These glimmers, mixed with an appreciation for the milieu of '70s and '80s horror films, lend the novel a tone simultaneously funny, paranoid, and claustrophobic. As the vicious storm approaches, a crotchety, Hamlet-quoting woodman wanders the grounds with his dog, always appearing as needed and seeming more like one of Shakespeare's ghosts than a real person. But that may be the point. When Basil not-so-subtly says, "It's like he's the actual devil or something," Andrew retorts, "That doesn't mean he won't help us."

What's real and what isn't feeds the world of Made to Break. From its characters' total lack of identity all the way to an ending reminiscent of The Graduate—a burst of the ideal so juxtaposed with the novel that it may very well be a figment of Andrew's imagination—this book stands toe-to-toe with the fears many of us will never outrun. It doesn't bat an eye. And that's a good thing.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wrote a lengthy review to this book, but it got deleted, so expect this review to be rushed & erratic. Sorry! =(

Basically what D. Foy does right in this novel is craft a story that's harsh, nervy, tenebrous, & steeped in profound personal history. Made To Break is Bret Easton Ellis-esque though not as revelatory as I hoped it would be.

D. Foy constructs a novel here that explores the nature & parameters of friendship. Are friends forever? Are they fleeting? Are they something comfortable & convenient? Is a good friend one who accepts you despite relentlessly reminding you of all your past transgressions? Is a good friend one who deserves your forgiveness after doling out some questionably extreme pranks? Is a good friend one who would place your life, your very life—to save your life—into the shadowy hands of a dubious outsider? Are friends just strangers who coincidentally develop a certain "bond" over time, and does that bond necessarily mean anything?

Are you looking for answers to these questions? You won't find any (at least not immediately) in the course of Made To Break because D. Foy never explicitly outlines his definitive thesis. You might be able to deduce one theory based on the outcomes of the characters, but humans are fickle creatures of habit (hopefully that's not too revealing of what happens), and the characters' end results are hardly sublime enough to be a plausible solution to the questions D. Foy raises.

Instead, D. Foy writes a stunning "dark & stormy night" story where a motley crew of rough-and-tumble types takes stock of all of its tangled friendships. D. Foy does a great job of fashioning a void, of describing how that void stares back at you during times of crisis, and how all-out chaos forces you to reflect. The prospect of annihilation is a reckoning that these characters & the reader him/herself will face together as this novel perilously unfolds.

While D. Foy has a remarkable handling of language, as many other reviewers here on Goodreads have noted, he structures his sentences & even paragraphs in an occasionally disjointed way. His transitions are jarring & difficult to grasp, but his structuring isn't a pitfall of the novel. On the contrary, it's a stylistic strength, synonymous with the experience transpiring in the book, drawing you deeper into the turmoil of nature & humanity's wrath.

Maybe it's a good thing my review was deleted (I'd rather not think so though) because it forced me to take quick inventory of my own thoughts, just like the characters in Made To Break are also forced to do.

Oh, one other thing that bothered me about this book is how long it took for tension to build until it all quickly unraveled. Two hundred pages—the book is only about 218 pages itself—paint a manic portrait of this dire episode, but everything (well, maybe not everything) ends up generally okay in the last few pages, maybe even better than okay. It depends on who you ask, I guess. Is the book really about its destination though? Not quite, but I would like for it to be in this case. As I said, you won't find any answers here, and maybe that's just indicative of the senseless cruelty within D. Foy's universe as it exists in Made To Break.

[Full Stop]

Made to Break – D. Foy

by Nathan Goldman

[Two Dollar Radio; 2014]

Breathtaking and cataclysmic, Made to Break — D. Foy's debut — follows the drug-misted, years-overdue reckoning of five friends stranded in a Lake Tahoe cabin on the brink of New Year’s Eve, 1996. The storm that traps these so-called “buddies” begins as a plot device but transforms into an image of the group’s inescapable cage of insecurities, self-doubts, and betrayals. Like an updated take on the claustrophobic dinner party of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the novel’s restrictive circumstances force its characters to sit still long enough to let their ghosts reify before them. The drama heightens as it becomes clear that one of the friends will likely die before the storm passes. As the scenery transforms into a “strobic land of bugaboos dreamed and real,” the novel reveals itself as a meditation on masks, deceit, and the catastrophic oneness of glamor and grime. The difference between glitter and grit, Foy reveals, is often merely a trick of the light.

The first thing a reader notices in picking up Made to Break is Foy’s phenomenal prose, which I hesitate to even label as such: the term itself seems too restrictive. Like Joyce, Woolf, McCarthy, and others before him, Foy maintains basic structures of the prose novel while obliterating and reinventing the reader’s notion of what a sentence can do. Made to Break is full of powerful juxtapositions of high and low: crude sex jokes cut against existential epiphanies, and flourish-adorned metaphors abut slangy colloquialisms. Consider:

“On the floor, in a bamboo cage with pits and dung, lay a lovebird dead as wood.

‘Now that,’ Basil said, tapping the cage with his boot, is some weird-ass shit.’”

The two levels are not disparate. Foy’s ear for the cadence of sentences finds the vanishing point between what we often think of as the separate categories of “theme” and “language,” reminding us that such distinctions are artificially imposed in analysis; in the experience, whether of event or of literature, it’s all the same. Foy deploys contractions in such a way as to make the reader wonder whether it is no coincidence that we most often hear them in informal speech and strictly metered poetry, as here: “We just sat there in the cold, and all that giant black seemed to’ve swallowed up the world.” Foy’s close attention to the interplay of sound and sense and narration and dialogue makes Made to Break feel as if it were not written but breathed into being, like an ancient epic.

Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/06/06/r...

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

bought this on marketplace, and have an uncorrected advance proof copy dated march 18, 2014. Looking forward to it.

Flashbacks and forwards add sombre and sober notes to the proceedings, but on the whole this is one long druggy trip. Confined to a wooden shack by floods near Lake Tahoe, a group of old-enough-to-know-better friends take drugs and drink and try to work out how to get home, in more than one sense. There's an accident at the beginning which wrecks their truck and injures one of the party, Dinky, an ex-soldier. It turns out fatally, so his 'Dinky-must-die ' pronouncements are not just drug induced paranoia. The novel uses horror film tropes but is essentially a love story. The writing is often druggy and witty and rushes by in frothy pleasure. Here's a quote, although the copy I've got tells me not to quote without a comparison to the finished book:
And then Hickory rose to greet me, the shag fell away, goofy and light she floated my way, petals in her hair, and from her eyes, though I was still numb, still my head was a bucket of sand, the floating blossom, dancing girl, she came my way to pour herself out and smother me gold'... (this is despite the slagging off of hippies elsewhere in the book).

Enjoyable

[Ryan Bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this while spending a couple days in a cabin in Idyllwild—bought it for that occasion, actually. Amazing prose, unlike anything I've ever read. Like, spitting out slang with the energy of the Coen Brothers. Solid all the way through.

One cringe-worthy moment took me out: a pretty disparaging flashback about trans character. I get that the character relating the story (along with all characters in the cabin) is supposed to be a scumbag, but still... the repeated uses of "it" and "she-male" felt more used to elicit laughs rather than character-building. I never expect art to be PC, but when offenses feel solely like a product of being out of touch (like Stephen King's hokey racism/homophobia), I just can't dig.

Small quibble. Besides that, it's an excellent book. I'm in awe.

[Matt Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in the tradition of road novels, the author captures a group in the midst of their own confusing, carefree time - the second summer of love - and offers this slice of their life. The characters here seem to be creating their own narratives, while the author just clips behind them with a pen and pad. Manic young people, smeared with the grime of living and dancing feverishly to the music in their heads. They are the condensed id of a generation, full of cheaters, dopers, flakes, sluts, schizos, and everyone else that tries to speed along the edge and doesn't expect to get cut. Their peaks & valleys, failures & misery, are chronicled here in stark, unforgiving realness by a writer who knows exactly how to describe a life so frightening, and a life so divine.

[Mutz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really did not find anything appealing about any of the characters. I found myself wishing at times they would all get hit on the head so that they all might die so that the book would end. I skimmed through many of the flash back scenes. I just couldn't stomach another drug/drunken pointless party scene filled with people I couldn't bring myself to care about at all. I feel like I wasted my time reading this book. No, I know I wasted my time.

I probably wouldn't have finished the book, but with the storm (yes I read this during two days of thunderstorms) the library website went down and I couldn't check out another book on my kindle.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are many ways in which I did not enjoy this book. The characters' names are ridiculous to me, the characters themselves are mostly driven by stupidity more than self-destruction, which is what I would have assumed the novel was more about, etc. However, the author has an interesting voice, which seems to be an attempt to filter all of the moronic choices that are made through a language of education and refinement, but really winding up for the most part with gobbledygook and seemingly pointless references to Hamlet.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first you won't know what you are reading, and this might be frustrating to some, but after a short while, you won't care because in spite of what you think you want, you become unexpectedly invested in these people in ways that only the best of writers can somehow manage. If you want to experience the next big thing in literature, GET THIS BOOK!!!

[Andy Weston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Early in the novel one of the characters quotes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If that's your thing, then this book could well be for you, but it's not for me.

4 characters find themselves deserted in a cabin, not an unknown premise for a novel, but the drug-fuelled antics of these ex military is a disappointment.

[Delia · Rating 5 out of 5]

arresting and marvelous. five stars for (new author) d. foy's ability to manipulate the written word and keep his readers on their toes. unexpected and a book that demands attention and fast completion. was sorry to reach the end. looking forward to, hopefully, more of the same for the future