World's End (Contemporary American Fiction)
by T.C. Boyle
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Book Summary Information
Author: T.C. BoyleEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-07-20
ISBN: 0140299939
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of World's End (Contemporary American Fiction)
Book Review: Big family saga minus the cheap melodrama
Summary: 5 Stars
T C Boyle's Pen/Faulkner Award winning novel "World's End" looks like a daunting read. It's after all over 450 pages long and boasts a cast of characters that spans several generations and makes Tolstoy's "War and Peace" seem like a cosy family drama. It's hard work initially figuring out who's who and this is complicated by Boyle making us jump backwards and forwards alternating between the 17th and 20th Century, but once you get into a groove, it's no sweat. "World's End" is a multigenerational family saga with all the pyrotechnics you'd expect but Boyle expertly skirts and avoids melodrama. The themes of real estate, power, race, class and betrayal are worked to their fullest and the effect is nothing short of stunning. All quite old fashionedly powerful stuff except for Boyle's quirky sense of humour (eg, Walter van Brunt's accidents) that nudges the novel somewhere left field. Boyle's own empathy for the hippy movement of the 1960s also lends an authencity to the "present day" developments. The novel is really about Walter's search for his mysteriously missing black sheep of a father, Truman - an enigma till the end - and as he drives himself and others crazy discovering his past and how the histories of three feuding clans are inextricably bound by blood, hatred and deceit, he comes face to face with the shocking truth that in three hundred years, nothing changes and humanity is powerless against the forces that threaten to engulf them. Boyle is a great storyteller. His prose is exotic, colourful, always compelling and a joy to read. Reading "World's End" takes commitment and dedication but the reward makes it all worthwhile. This is one novel nobody who loves serious literature should miss. Highly recommended.
Summary of World's End (Contemporary American Fiction)
Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.
It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960's back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940's to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the van Brunts--will be revealed.
T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Water Music, a hilarious reinvention of the exploration of the Niger, returns to his native New York State with this darkly comic historical drama exploring several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley. Walter Van Brunt begins the book with a catastrophic motorcycle accident that sends him back on a historical investigation, eventually encompassing the frontier struggles of the late 1600s. Any book that opens with a three-page "list of principal characters" and includes chapters titled "The Last of the Kitchawanks," "The Dunderberg Imp," and "Hail, Arcadia!" promises a welcome tonic to the self-conscious inwardness of much contemporary fiction; World's End delivers and was rewarded with the PEN/Faulkner Award for 1988.
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