Miss Subways: A Novel
By: David Duchovny / Narrated By: David Duchovny, Tea Leoni
Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
Not Duchovny’s best, but still a good solid Listen, a wildly inventive novel
How can I call this inventive when Neil Gaiman’s done it before: Old Gods in New World Modern Life?
Cuz Duchovny makes this more a tale of New York City life, and a love story/romance. That everything winds up in a PC-Type O’ Clusterf**k?!
TOTAL David Duchovny!
Emer is a woman who’s a typical Manhattanite, riding the subways, sticking to her neighborhood, enjoying life in New York with her ever-aspiring writer boyfriend Con. Con’s doing a reading of his Grand Opus, an In Your Face book that paints him as a challenging Alt-Right kinda sorta author, but toooo bad: Trump is alREAdy in Office, and the Alt-Right are now soooo de rigueur that his attempt at provocative just seems pathetic.
Still, Emer desperately wants to be supportive and share in this, Con’s Big Night, but she’s kinda embarrassing him in front of people he wants to impress with her silly gibes and rather hysterical fits of giggling. When these People in the Industry want to continue talking with him, he blows her off, and she trundles off back home to wait for him.
Enter Sid the Mini-Me dressed as a Doorman, who blows into Emer’s apartment, tells her she’s not really living, not really loving, and in a overblown hurly burly manner, gives her an ultimatum: Con might be in the process of cheating on her, and oh yeh, he’s about to die. He brings Emer’s phone to her and shows her video of the current moment of Con with one of those Persons from the Industry, a beautiful Black woman named Anansi, and they’re about to kiss. Then Sid fast forwards it to Con being hit by a car. -BUT- Emer can save his life; all she has to do is agree to a new life, where their past is wiped away, they must NEVER meet in Life, and Emer must live a brand new life comPLETEly sans Con. In a frantic dither as Sid keeps showing and reshowing the moment of impact, Emer finally shouts OKAY! She agrees, just don’t let Con die.
And so the rest of the story is of how Emer’s life is going in her new life without Con, a life where she keeps having these weird sensations, these weird “dreams”. As a child, she’d had a tumor removed from a part of her brain that had somehow left her with the Shadow of a Shadow within her mind: A sort of ability to mix dreams and reality, see things in startling visions.
By day, she works with first-graders at a posh school where it’s soooo PC that things can get reeeeally touchy; by evening she checks on her dad who’s always calling her Bill as he has dementia. By night, she’s ordering from the local Chinese restaurant and playing her ukulele, p’raps phoning her foulmouthed and irreverent school psychologist best friend. And mostly? She’s alone.
Enter, a handsome stranger she meets during subway jaunts. A hot guy who goes by the name of Con.
Uh-oh.
A mad, passionate, public display of affection leads to a steamy I-Feel-Like-I’ve-Known-You-Forever night at her place. Suddenly Emer is full of life and joy and hope, dreamy, steamy, hope!
Then at school, Emer totally loses her cool with a set of troublemaking girls that sends her profane headmaster off to find her, setting up Mea Culpa Meetings with the three sets of parents. At one of them, the mom’s boyfriend breezes in, a tad late, and? It’s Con.
Uh-oh.
And so it goes, with Duchovny’s Miss Subways being a mashup of Old Gods brought to the New World via immigrants, but who’ve been left by the side of the road as people assimilated, with Old Gods brought via force through slaves, dragged from their homeland. With grand passions and obsessions, with demons going mano-a-mano with gods.
And with Emer finding an inner strength, and allies in the deepest, darkest parts of New York’s subway system. Where golems and urban myths have her back, where even Con, a man who’s always relied on the kindness of women to carry the heavy loads for him, might just do as Emer has done (She’s found her “lady balls” as Sid has put it forthrightly…), and make a real choice with weight, with consequences… by himself… and for the good of something greater than himself…
Téa Leoni is awesome as Emer, managing to carry, with just her voice, all the quirkiness and expressiveness that one usually finds in her very physical acting. On film, she’s magnificent, her eyes flashing, or her eyebrows cocking, her lips twisting in a way that lends humor to her quips. Here, all that’s done with absolutely perfect comic timing. And Duchovny? Bless his heart (As we say down here), the man doesn’t even try to emote, delivering the humor and wryness of his writing through JUST the humor and wryness of his writing. It’s adorable, and where I initially found it off-putting (My initiation was the perFECtion of Bucky F*cking Dent!), now I just plain embrace a David Duchovny narration of his own work. The duo’s daughter is also doing her part by reading the quotes Emer finds so beguiling and funny on the subway cars’s advertising spaces. All in all, brava, bravo, brava once again.
Wrap all this up in a way that’s just less than stellar (Looooong speeches whereby characters make declarations about gods, mythology, and the current state of our culture, where, if you even TRY to Say ANYthing, You’re Going to Offend SOMEone. I didn’t need the speeches, as I thought the situations created, the many and varied characters thrown into creatively crafted circumstances, the clever repartee between characters (esPECially Emer’s hiLARiously raunchy Headmaster’s diatribes!) got the point through well enough.
So, aside from kinda sorta a biiiiiit of an anticlimactic ending, a biiiiit of excessive verbiage, the whole of the thing was immensely enjoyable. This received a sorta mixed review from our little audiobook club, and I gotta admit that, in between the club’s Listening and the writing of this review, dude! I had to listen to it yet again, paying close attention the whole time cuz, tho’ I enjoy a re-Listen as much as the next audiobook addict, I’d comPLETEly forgotten pretty much everything important. So I dunno if that means I’m really really good at being a Can Experience Things Just Like The Very First Time type o’ gal, -OR- it’s eminently forgettable.
P’raps YOU must listen, YOU must decide. But hey! I laughed each time, I remember THAT at least…!!!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.