This book came to me highly recommended, but I was tempted to give it less than two stars.
Somehow I did find my way to the end of the thing. That was some time ago and I don't remember any of it. All I remember is that it wasn't an easy journey. At times I remember thinking I would gladly trade my struggle to read this dense, tiresome, and incoherent prose for the hapless journey of its caricatured protagonist through the War ravaged South!
I won't attempt to recreate the story line here - there wasn't one. Such as it is, it could be summed up in one sentence, "A man find's his way home." So the "substance" of the novel has to do with an attempt to convey history, and the human condition, in an intriguing, poetical, and insightful manner. That is a noble aspiration. The problem is that the author completely in his effort to accomplish it.
That this book is held up as a noteworthy novel is an insult to the literary tradition of the American South, which has produced such great writers as Faulkner, O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams. It simply has nothing new to say about anything, and doesn't do so in the most pretentious, predictable, (and yet also nebulous and dreary) manner conceivable!
It's fame is not a negative testament to the incapacity of American writers - but to the ineptitude and corruption of current publishing and criticism - the state of which, is for the most part, a scandal and like this novel a disgrace.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2014 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
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