The Eighth Day
by Thornton Wilder
Summary
In Coaltown, Illinois, in the summer of 1902, Breckenridge Lansing is shot dead at rifle practice in his own garden, and his neighbour John Ashley, a mining engineer with no motive anyone can name, is convicted of the murder on evidence nobody quite examines. Days before the execution, masked men stop the prison train, unshackle Ashley, and vanish with him, and the novel opens out from that mystery into something much stranger and larger than a whodunit.
Ashley flees south, ending as a fugitive under a false name in the copper country of Chile, where Wilder gives him a whole second life of work, usefulness and anonymous decency. Back in Coaltown his family, ruined and shunned, performs one of the quietest heroisms in American fiction: his wife Beata turns the house into a boarding establishment, his daughter Lily becomes a celebrated singer, and his son Roger goes to Chicago and writes his way up from nothing into journalism, the children of the disgrace turning out, one by one, to be remarkable. The Lansing family gets the same patient attention, which is how the reader, long before the town, comes to understand who actually fired the shot and why, and what the masked rescuers owed John Ashley.
Wilder frames it all with essayistic meditations on history, providence and the family of man, the eighth day of the title being ours: creation continuing, with the outcome unknown.
Around four hundred and thirty pages.
Best for readers who want a nineteenth century style novel of fate and family written with twentieth century irony, by a writer betting everything on the long view.
Historical Context & Significance
The Eighth Day won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1968, and it was his first novel in nearly twenty years: he wrote it over twenty months of self imposed exile in Douglas, Arizona, away from the fame of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. The award joined a shelf that already held a Pulitzer for the novel, for The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1928, and two Pulitzers for the plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.
Reception afterwards split on the meditative frame: admirers took the philosophising as the book's spine, doubters as its padding, and the novel has settled into the odd shelf of major late works by writers remembered for earlier miracles, read far less than The Bridge of San Luis Rey and defended warmly by those who reach it.
It was Wilder's last big statement; Theophilus North followed quietly in 1973, and he died in 1975.