DEVIL'S SINKHOLE

In Donovan’s debut novel, two young artists bond over their search for truth before facing a life-threatening crisis. 

Conor Kemp is a bookish poet in Austin, Texas—an “old soul” (as his aunt described him) who’s obsessed with scrutinizing life for traces of meaning and purpose. He meets Emma Vega and is immediately drawn to her own brand of artistic angst; she longs to achieve “Something transcendent”—to “feel what Van Gogh felt on that starry night, crystalize it in acrylic and create a holy relic.” They playfully argue over the nature of reality—he’s a committed realist about the existence of the external world—and she promises him an “experience so intense” that he “might look at things differently.” So they set a date to travel into the Devil’s Sinkhole, an “enormous vertical cavern” about 170 miles away, and drop some LSD. At the sinkhole, before their hallucinatory adventure, they bump into Canadian traveler Nigel Fitzhugh, a benignly loquacious mattress salesman. After the couple’s psychedelic trip, however, a gossipy waitress informs them that Nigel was found at the bottom of the sinkhole, and Emma immediately (and bewilderingly) assumes that Conor must have pushed him to his death. She panics and quickly crafts a stealthy getaway, which includes stealing the registry from the hotel where they lodged. But their plans go awry when their car blows a tire and Emma gets stung by a scorpion and kidnapped by an opportunistic local. Donovan inventively chronicles not only the couple’s flight from authorities, but also their tenuous negotiation with what’s real and what’s imagined. He ambitiously composes a kind of philosophical thriller—one in which the action is just as important as the stream of ideas that runs through it. Along the way, he artfully keeps readers in the dark about a great many things, which generates suspense as well as intellectual provocation: Why does Emma own a pistol? Is Nigel an unlucky tourist, or is he a serial killer? However, the author’s articulation of his philosophical themes feels laborious. He not only tediously reminds readers of the intellectual stakes, he even draws conclusions for them. Conor eventually finds evidence of meaning in the world—as if “every atom tells a story”—while Emma simply conjures her own meaning, building “a reality out of thin air.” Their dialogue, though, ultimately feels ponderous and didactic. In fact, the author’s tendency toward overexplanation is telegraphed early on. Conor is introduced as the kind of person who quickly explains his personal philosophy to strangers as a “fusion of Einstein and Proust, with some Nietzsche poured on top for added kick.” Emma, likewise, seems eager to share her Weltschmerz with anyone willing to grant her an audience. Interestingly, Conor reveals that he has a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre hanging in his room; one is reminded of Albert Camus’ criticism of Sartre’s novels—that his fictional elements were stale because he only used them as instruments to deliver ideas. 

A thoughtful premise overburdened by attempts at profundity.