World's End - T. Coraghessan Boyle

Plot:  The Dutch settle upstate New York, much to the consternation of the natives.  Over three centuries, not much changes.


Why read it:  Boyle apparently grew up here and knows the area and the people well.  When I first read this years ago, I was least impressed with the section set in the 1940's.  Now that I now know more of the history of the Peekskill riots and the associated history, that section of the book seems completely different to me now, and is one of the highlights. And there are ghosts, both the ancestral kind and the literary kind, as in Washington Irving and perhaps Melville.  Boyle is at a minimum, an interesting writer, and here, he's a great writer.  I can also vouch for Drop City.


A grand, centuries hopping tale of three families in the Hudson River Valley.  A novel of place, of fate, of being tied to the land, and what happens when you lose those things.   Boyle focuses on the Van Warts and Van Brunts, Dutch settlers to the New York are in the 1600's.  We met their ancestors in both the 1940's and 1960's.  Things haven't really changed much.  In some cases, not even the names, but the important thing is the Warts are still doing it to the Van Brunts.


A lot of the fun (although in a somewhat dark way) is in seeing history repeat itself time and time again, even as some of the characters are aware of that possibility and it still happens to them.  Only one character seems to have the ability to shake this, and his solution is to literally go to the world's end.  There's a character who is not very nice and has a habit of eating dirt, but you understand why he eats dirt after a while, and it makes sense; at least it did to me.  It didn't make him more sympathetic, but gave insight into why his family was where it was.


Another book that fortunately has a list of all the characters, as there are a lot.  And it is a book that you can argue with, but in a good way.  Is fate really that big of an influence over our lives?  That certainly is the tack the novel takes.  But it also seems to make the argument that we can overprescribe fate, and merely do things that seem to reinforce fate - in a "this is going to happen anyway, so why not?" mode.