It takes a kind of talent to write a long novel where I don’t have any feelings for any of the characters. I’ve studied writing enough to know that “Mary Sues”—characters who have no flaws—are to be avoided. Yet, writing so that no characters over a span of about 300 years seem to be able to garner at least pity (and my therapist tells me I a very sympathetic person) is a feat. All of which is to say I didn’t much enjoy the award-winning World’s End by T. C. Boyle. This novel is set in the Hudson Valley, which is one of my current obsessions, and I thought the sense of place would draw me in. Stories where everyone drinks all the time, and mostly they get high after that, and then wonder why tragic things happen when they drive, really aren’t for me. I accept and admit that the onus is on me. (I freely confess to preferring speculative fiction.)
Successfully writing a novel that ties several families together over the generations is, however, an achievement of literary architecture. It’s just that not all novels work for everyone. There is a sense of maybe a little cosmic justice at the end, but it feels at times almost as if the side that’s being cheered on is the wealthy one. Maybe it’s reflecting the way life works. Or maybe I’m not a subtle enough of a reader to understand. For whatever reason, it really didn’t speak to me. It could also be that I need to reflect on it more. Growing up poor with an alcoholic father and seeing firsthand the entrenched ways of the wealthy and how they effectively keep other people down, such tales tend to set me off. None of this is to gainsay the artistry since it clearly condemns the land theft from American Indians and unrepentant wealth.
It’s this last point from which the novel really takes its strength—ownership of the land. As mortal creatures we have a strange idea that we can own something that will outlast us. In the novel’s resolution that ownership shifts, unbeknownst to the wealthy, back to the original owners through an illegitimate child. There may be some social commentary intended here and this makes the story less of a justification of white ownership. I guess many of us are very sensitive to fascist characters since the Trump administration. Perhaps had I read the novel in the late eighties, when it was first published, this would’ve seemed less troubling because we would’ve thought then that such a thing could never happen. But three centuries is a long time and we simply can’t tell, although World’s End suggests justice might be served in the long term.
