Robert Buckeye's Re: Quin

In regard to Re: Quin

[To the uninitiated: this Substack is where you can follow my attempt to read every book Dalkey Archive has ever published. Every time I finish a book, I write a 200-word epistolary poem in response.]

Dear Robert, midway through your book, you write “Increasingly her characters find they can realize their internal search only through an external one elsewhere. In Quin’s world, search is synonymous with travel.”

I agree but might add one thing: their goal is, equally, escape.

· Berg is searching for his father but escaping his past (and mother).

· S, in Three, escapes; Ruth and Leonard escape mundanity through S—first physically, then via the memory of her.

· Passages, the search for a missing brother, turns out to be a couple fleeing their dissolving relationship.

· Tripticks—duh. Everyone is fleeing across America.

· And “Leaving School,” too, the point is the escape from order toward Quin’s own inner “anarchy, a frightful disorder.”

Travel, for Quin, is an escape from convention. It is still a search, but it is a doomed search, a negation of what was knowing that one is left to cobble together a life that may not hold up as well but will be far more honest. Thus, Quin burns the proverbial boats and continues forward: “…let us begin another journey. Change the setting. Everything is changing, country, the climate. There is no compromise now. No country we can return to.”

Matt