A Relationship Between Time and Apocalypse
A Review of
Junah at the End of the World: A Novel
Dan Leach
Paperback: Hub City Press, 2025
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Reviewed by G.W. Currier
A Piaget, a Timex, a TAG Heuer, all tell time, but do they tell the same kind of time? Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, urges us to distinguish between two kinds of time: chronos, time as ticking; and kairos, time as revelation. Dan Leach’s new novel, Junah at the End of the World straddles the in-between, of daily life acting as revelation.
Assigned by his teacher to turn a shoe box into “a time capsule … that tell[s] what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world,” Junah writes in scraps and scenes of his parents’ divorce, his unrequited crush, and what it means to be punk. The novel takes the form of Junah’s Y2K “time capsule,” a shoe box filled with scraps, lists, letters, and reflections, meant to preserve the world as he knows it for an uncertain future. Through this conceit, Leach gives us a patchwork narrative of late-90s Southern adolescence, replete with heartache, humor, and existential hope.
With masterful control, Leach, through Junah, unfolds the absurd act of preserving the world for a world destroyed. Junah’s teacher, Miss Meechum, assigns her students to preserve cultural mores through their writing, but Junah wonders if “[k]indness survive[s] the apocalypse?” It’s a fair question. So many apocalyptic narratives provide thin answers to the question, or show kindness as a quality only few possess—which may, unfortunately, be true. Many of these novels too explore the apocalypse after-the-fact. Junah explores it before-the-fact, through a sixth-grader’s kitschy assignment.
The fragmented structure of Junah nicely reflects the way in which time and apocalypse relate. Junah writes that his “people back here loved stories, but I preferred the list. After someone tells me a story, I cannot shake the feeling that they have been split into clones: the version of the self that appears in the story, and the version of the self that narrates that appearance.” Junah’s list-like narrative is an attempt at unity, perhaps even more an attempt at preserving his own humanity in the face of growing grotesqueries. (One of Junah’s classmates eats her own scabs, and if an autophagous adolescent isn’t Southern Gothic, nothing is.)
The author takes an artistic risk in using such a form, but as far as apocalypse is concerned, both Junah’s lists and his age are brilliantly welded, not merely supporting the themes but advancing them. “Lists require commitment,” Junah writes to his unknown shoe-box recipient. He is weary of “genres obsessed with their own capacity for accommodation.”
As December 1999 nears, Junah needs more and more shoeboxes. The question of what he should save is a way of asking what he should allow to perish. Junah is keen enough to understand that all things that have touched his life have molded him in some way: his parent’s divorce and his father’s re-marriage, his mother’s insistent religious questioning, the bullying and deaths of classmates.
His mother wants him to understand the story of Jesus, the story of redemption; his father insists that it isn’t the stories but the “ideas that save you.” Symbolically crucified between these two positions, suspended between the time of his present and the time needing to be handed off to the future (that’s actually a question of tradition, isn’t it?), Junah demands from himself an intensity of attention because he loves the world in all its fragmentation and forms, its pains and pleasures.
Those of us who lived through the wild worry of Y2K can recall how midnight passed: unremarkably. The relief was almost disappointing. Almost. Like Junah, who learns the art of writing through his assignment, we came to understand that the adverb is an important part of speech to keep in reserve, to use sparingly. I want to honor that sound bit of advice by simply stating how one should read Junah at the End of the World. Immediately.
G.W. Currier
G. W. Currier's fiction and poetry, inspired by the stories of his Hungarian-American family, have appeared in The Table Review, Saranac Review, Nimrod International Journal, Grand Little Things, The South Dakota Review, Waxwing, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and has taught at the University of Debrecen in Hungary through a Fulbright scholarship.
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