A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
An intricate plot, perfect title, and a harrowing look at the tie that binds.
An absorbing story of a modern marriage framed in Greek mythology.
Groff’s sharply drawn portrait of a marriage begins on a cold Maine beach, with newlyweds “on their knees, now, though the sand was rough and hurt. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands.” This opener ushers in an ambitious, knowing novel besotted with sex—in a kaleidoscope of variety—much more abundant than the commune-dwellers got up to in Groff’s luminous Arcadia(2012). The story centers first on Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, a dashing actor at Vassar, who marries his classmate, flounders, then becomes a famous playwright. Lotto’s name evokes the lottery—and the Fates, as his half of the book is titled. His wife, the imperial and striking Mathilde, takes over the second section, Furies, astir with grief and revenge. The plotting is exquisite, and the sentences hum; Groff writes with a pleasurable, bantering vividness. Her book is smart, albeit with an occasional vibrato of overkill. The author gives this novel a harder edge and darker glow than previous work, echoing Mathilde’s observation, “She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.” Indeed it is.
An intricate plot, perfect title, and a harrowing look at the tie that binds.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-447-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
This overlong (946 pages) and rather pretentious first novel concerns itself with the impasse of the modern intellectual, living in a world where everyone wears a false face of one kind or another, wanting to believe in something, and "knowing" too much to have faith in anything. The scene is Spain, Rome and Paris in Europe, New York City (mainly Greenwich Village) and a New England town in the United States, and at moments an unnamed Central American Republic. The characters, and they multiply- since Mr. Gaddis has tried to write a "novel without a hero", range from hipsters and homosexuals to spoiled Catholics and Puritans to aimless pseudo-intellectuals, town drunkards, and religious fanatics. In what is also a novel without a defined plot, the most interesting parts concern Wyatt Gwyon, as his various activities take him from forging old masters in New York to Spain where he attempts to find some kind of truth; and his father, a New England minister who converts himself to Mithraism- sun worship. But the main fault of the novel is a complete lack of discipline. Gaddis writes with ease and vigor about a Greenwich Village gathering, but repeats this sequence many times. He knows many odd facts about ancient religious and he injects them all. He is familiar with many languages, and there are passages in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Latin and even Hungarian. It is a pity that, in his first novel, he did not have stronger editorial guidance than is apparent in the book for he can write very well- even though most of the time he just lets his pen run on.
Pub Date: March 10, 1955
ISBN: 1564786919
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1955
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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