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Loading... October Lightby John Gardner
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This won the 1976 Natioanl Book Critics' Circle fiction award for 1976. It is in two alteranting parts, one concerning a stubborn Vermont brother and sister who try to kill each other, the other invlving drug dealers and users in Califonia, the Pacific Ocean, and Mexico. The story laid in Vermont is full of interest, especially as it works it way to the denouement. The California segment was of far less interest, especially as it plodded to its stupid ending. Only toward the end did I come to enjoying the reading of the book (  ) Schmerguls | Apr 18, 2008 |  When this novel came out, many critics raised caveats and cavills. The novel itself was a fine thing, brilliantly written, a brio performance. But, included in the novel is another novel, somewhat truncated, a "trashy novel." The presence of that book-in-a-book marred the serious work. Or so was said. I never quite bought it. The trashy novel was amusing in its way, and added a level of counterpoint to the main story, which is, in its own way, about censoroiusness about low culture, but itself censure from bigotry more than censure from considered judgment. The critics, in a sense, leapt into the author's trap. To what end, though? Well, leave all that aside. I rate this book highly for one scene, one chapter, which is exquisite. It's a party scene. A youngster brings out his French horn and nothing is quite the same again. The novel is supposed to reveal character. This novel reveals a whole lot more. (  )1  wirkman | Apr 9, 2007 | A rich and complex novel, though flawed, of an elderly brother and sister living in the same house after her husband's death, and the feud that sends her to her room for the length of the book, sometimes as prisoner, sometimes as striker. James L. Page, the brother, is bitter over how the world has changed, his son's suicide years ago, and his own inability to escape his ingrained prejudices and hatreds. Yet Gardner manages to imbue this wretched man with a degree of humanity, and in the end succeeds in provoking sympathy, if not grudging respect for him. The book is marred by the book-within-a-book device when Sally, the sister, passes her solitude by reading an incomplete trashy novel she has found in her room. Fine, but more convoluted than it needed to be. (  ) burnit99 | Jan 19, 2007 | A bit self-serving and pious, but nonetheless beautiful. ( ) NicholasPayne | Jul 26, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)
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