Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was published by Tor Books in 2005. The novel defies summary because its central conceits refuse to operate by consistent rules. Alan (or Adam, or Andy — his name changes throughout) has moved to a Toronto neighborhood where he’s renovating a house and helping his neighbors build a free municipal wireless network by placing access points on rooftops. His father is a mountain. Literally: his father is a sentient granite mountain in the Canadian wilderness. His mother is a washing machine. His brothers include a clairvoyant, a trio of nesting-doll siblings (one contains the other two), and Davey, who is violent, possibly evil, and keeps coming back from the dead.
Doctorow treats these impossibilities with absolute matter-of-factness — no explanation is offered for how a mountain sires children or why a washing machine functions as a mother. The family mythology operates by the logic of fairy tale, where metaphor and reality are not distinguished, and the reader either accepts it or doesn’t. The “realistic” plot — the wireless networking project, the neighborhood gentrification, the budding romance between Alan and a woman with wings that she binds under her clothes — is told with the same documentary specificity as the fantastic elements.
The book is Doctorow’s most polarizing: readers who want their science fiction to make scientific sense are bewildered, while readers who appreciate genre-bending find it his richest work. It is, among other things, a meditation on family dysfunction that uses literalized metaphor to express what realistic fiction can only describe.
Collecting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15