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Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

di Diane DeSanders

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3818646,023 (3.29)1
"In the wake of World War II, a young girl grows up in Texas, lost between the unpredictable rage of her war-traumatized father and the distant stoicism of her mother. Finding herself at odds with the beliefs--religious and otherwise--of her family, she must discover her own way of making sense of the world and her place in it ... For Dick and Jane, Dallas after World War II is a place of promise and prosperity: the first home air conditioners are making summertime bearable and Dick's position at his father's business, the Cadillac dealership, is assured. Jane has help with the house and the children, and garden parties and holiday celebrations are spirited social affairs. For the oldest of their three daughters, however, life is full of frustrating mysteries. The stories the adults tell her don't make sense. Too curious for comfort, she finds her questions only seem to annoy them. Why won't they tell the truth about Santa? What is that Holy Spirit business, and what is the difference between an angel and a ghost? Why is her mother often so tense and sad? And why does her father keep flying into violent rages? Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is an intimate, finely crafted novel about the innocence and vulnerability of childhood and the dangers posed by adults who cannot cope with life's complexities. It is also about the ingenuity born of loneliness and neglect, and the surprising, strange beauty of the world."--… (altro)
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In this novel-in-short-stories (at least that's how I read it) set in the 1950s, an unnamed young girl worries that the adults in her life are not telling her the truth about things that are important to her. For example, is Santa Claus real? Meanwhile, her anxious mother keeps popping out babies and her angry, depressed father clump-CLUMPS on war-damaged feet. This collection has some good moments, but I didn’t find that it added up to a satisfying whole. ( )
  akblanchard | Jun 14, 2022 |
Although I'm not quite sure exactly why, I found this story to be absolutely riveting. The narrator here is an unnamed seven year-old girl, living in post-war Dallas. She is the oldest of three girls. The other two she calls "the babies" (although they are named). Their parents are "Dick and Jane," names which should resonate with children of the fifties. Dick is a crippled war veteran, given to sudden, unexplained fits of rage, who works for his father's Cadillac dealership, along with his "favored" brother, Ted. The young narrator is precocious and inquisitive, often neglected, and left to run wild with the disturbed boy next door, the adopted Nathan. Both sets of grandparents figure prominently, as do her many unanswered questions - about Santa, the Easter Rabbit, Biblical stories filled with killing amongst fathers and brothers, and, most importantly, what's wrong with her daddy. Her father's story gradually unfolds, as does the narrator's own. Some terrible, awful things happen over the course of a year between Christmases. Oh, and Hap and Hazard (Hazzy) are dogs, by the way.

In HAP AND HAZARD AND THE END OF THE WORLD, Diane DeSanders has crafted a dark and unputdownable book about childhood innocence and adult indifference in a family that will be hard to forget. I was mesmerized. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )
1 vota TimBazzett | Jun 13, 2019 |
No one will tell me anything.~ from Hap and Hazard and the End of the World by Diane DeSanders

The world is a mystery to a child. Adults are the most mysterious of all.

I once wrote a poem about how I loved a child's "fragile questionings." I remembered that line while reading Hap & Hazard and the End of the World.

Most adults don't want to answer a child's questions, especially if the question threatens to upset the web of protection adults spin around a child. We tell them to believe in Santa Claus, in the Tooth Fairy, in the Easter Bunny--even when other children reveal they are not real.

I remember being horribly embarrassed when a Third-Grade boy explained that there is no Tooth Fairy. Too late--I had already shared the silver dollar I found under my pillow, proudly exclaiming it was from the Tooth Fairy. And I remember how our son pretended to believe in Santa Claus because it was expected.

The girl in this book pushes adults to tell her the truth. She desperately wants to understand the world and her life.

The book shares the loneliness of a girl who does not fit in."It seems there is something wrong with me," she cries out, "other people do not appear to be having this problem...other kids seem to know what to do and join in." What's wrong with me, she wonders. Oh, I remember feeling that way after a move when everything was so foreign, right down to the playground games.

When adults have problems, we think that ignorance protects the children. What is wrong with Daddy? the girl asks. He was off to war during her first years. He returns a bitter, angry man. How can her parents explain what they don't even understand themselves? The horror of war and the blasted bodies of comrades in arms, and the horrible pain of mutilation and the months of rebuilding what once was a strong and young body? Being crippled, self-medicating?

Set in the post-WWII years, so many things the girl observes were familiar. Vivid details of lipsticked cigarettes and willow trees, which were also in my childhood yard. Make-believe stories about The Girl recalling my own make-believe stories about being an orphan in Scotland or the star of the Nancy Show. The girl's mother retreats to her sewing room, a feeling I know well.

There is humor in the novel.

I recently realized that grown-ups don't know what you're doing if they're not looking at you. Although you have to watch out for the sides of their eyes. ~from Hap and Hazard at the End of the World by Diane DeSanders

And a horrible scene when an older boy abuses her trust and admiration.

There is a change in the universe. There are no more witches and goblins out there. There is no Blue Fairy. The world is plain and flat now, more gray, the mystery and brilliance gone out of it And all of the darkness is inside of me.~ from Hap and Hazard and the End of the World by Diane DeSanders

The novel left me with an ache.

I received a copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. ( )
  nancyadair | Jun 2, 2019 |
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. ( )
  TexasBookLover | Jun 26, 2018 |
Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing.
The title for this novel could have been picked from any of the chapter titles in this book. It took me a little while to get into the flow of this book but after that it went quickly. for me it left me with more questiosn than anwsers and I wish that certian parts and themes are fleshed out a bit more. ( )
  reb922 | May 29, 2018 |
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"In the wake of World War II, a young girl grows up in Texas, lost between the unpredictable rage of her war-traumatized father and the distant stoicism of her mother. Finding herself at odds with the beliefs--religious and otherwise--of her family, she must discover her own way of making sense of the world and her place in it ... For Dick and Jane, Dallas after World War II is a place of promise and prosperity: the first home air conditioners are making summertime bearable and Dick's position at his father's business, the Cadillac dealership, is assured. Jane has help with the house and the children, and garden parties and holiday celebrations are spirited social affairs. For the oldest of their three daughters, however, life is full of frustrating mysteries. The stories the adults tell her don't make sense. Too curious for comfort, she finds her questions only seem to annoy them. Why won't they tell the truth about Santa? What is that Holy Spirit business, and what is the difference between an angel and a ghost? Why is her mother often so tense and sad? And why does her father keep flying into violent rages? Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is an intimate, finely crafted novel about the innocence and vulnerability of childhood and the dangers posed by adults who cannot cope with life's complexities. It is also about the ingenuity born of loneliness and neglect, and the surprising, strange beauty of the world."--

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