The Facades

Eric Lundgren

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, August 9th 2014

Eric Lundgren’s debut novel is a curious and entertaining amalgam of mystery story, farce and suburban angst that reads a little like a co-production between David Lynch and Jonathan Franzen. Set in the fading Midwestern city of Trude, it opens when well-known mezzo-soprano Molly Norberg vanishes during an opera rehearsal and follows her husband Sven’s increasingly disheartened attempts to find her. As the fruitless search drags on, Sven slowly begins to admit to himself that Molly may well have disappeared in an attempt to free herself from the characters she was forced to play both at work. And when his son is lured away from him by a charismatic evangelist preacher, he begins to wonder if his apparently happy family was all a self-serving illusion.

Given this synopsis, it is tempting to dismiss The Facades as exactly what it says on the cover, but in actual fact it is as much about what lies beneath as above. Both Trude and its inhabitants are shaped by the legacy a maverick architect whose works include an inwardly spiralling mall complex that culminates in a labyrinth that nobody has ever successfully solved, and an exclusive rest home that will only accept residents who can write (and maintain) a suitably harrowing life story. 

This surrealist setting is also home to an extraordinary array of characters, including a former wrestling champion now mayor, an armed band of renegade librarians and a pair of policemen more interested in enhancing their own reputations than finding Sven’s wife. The result is both a satirical exploration of a society in which the superficial has been internalised and the personal commodified, and an amusing entertainment in its own right.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/tale-enterertainingly-surreal