Joyland - Emily Schultz

It seems everyone thumbs their noses at the 80s. Most will pretend it was a ridiculous decade, one based on fear and extreme consumption, all backdropped by big haired, synthed-out pop music. But that is an adult point of view, the sight that understands the world as larger than four blocks and a few hundred people. For those of us that grew up in the 80s there is an uneasy nostalgia there and Joyland occupies that pocket of remembering perfectly. This is a novel of florescent memories and chunky pixelated landscapes, all set within the confines of being young in a small town. This is a novel about being bored constantly and the fantasies of what goes on just beyond the train tracks leading out of town. Yet, beneath all this supposed innocence is a bubbling unease, the world large and looming, waiting just behind adolescence.

Joyland avoids the easy trap of relying too heavily on the decade’s pop culture. Accented by Nate Powell’s striking black and white drawings, the book instead uses the video games and TV shows are used more as sign posts to the era, as reminders of the types of media invading the youth. Shultz has done an impressive job of depicting the 80s children, not as the originators of multi-media culture, but the first that were born completely indoctrinated by it. This was the first generation where the bombardment of multi-media culture was not only normal, but expected and craved for.

Chris, the first of the main characters, is defined by the video games he plays, sucked deep within them so that his movements are simply extensions of the game itself. He is invincible inside the game, mirroring the romantic ideals of an innocent childhood. Tammy, the spy of the neighborhood and Chris’s sister, is constantly comparing the relationships she encounters with TV shows, most obviously her older neighbor. Yet, this way of filtering the world through media leads only to the abrupt incidences, the climatic fight being the most obvious example. This is reality suddenly revealing itself from behind the joystick, peeking from around the screen.

The interesting manifestation of this in the culture is not the vapidness that so many historians point to but Joyland’s emphasis on the creation and acceptance of overt violence and sex. Ultimately this is where the maturity of the novel’s characters reside, where the world and society stops hiding behind censored screens and presents itself. This can be evidenced by Tammy viewing her half naked neighbor making out in her pool or Chris’s first sexual encounter: while these types of incidents have happened all throughout history, the 80s seems to be the first where they are overt and public. In turn, everyone becomes like Tammy, a spy, a voyeur of culture, of violence and sex, leading to the current infestation of reality shows and celebrity news.

This is not a childhood pastoral but a gradual disintegration of nostalgia. The reader then must battle their way through their own 80s impressions and compare the two, most likely finding them remarkably similar.

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