World's End

In 1968 Walter Van Brunt, twenty two, drunk and high, crashes his motorcycle into a historical marker near Peterskill, New York, in the Hudson Valley, and loses a foot. The marker commemorates a 1693 uprising of tenant farmers against the local lords of Van Wart Manor. From there T. Coraghessan Boyle builds a big comic novel that runs across three centuries and three families: the landowning Van Warts, the Native American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the Van Brunts, Dutch tenant farmers.

Walter's story is a search for his missing father, who is said to have betrayed his left wing wife and friends in 1949 and helped provoke the Peterskill Riot, an attack on a leftist gathering. Walter goes to work for the wealthy right winger Depeyster Van Wart, starts an affair with Depeyster's daughter Mardi, and eventually tracks his father to Alaska. Alongside runs the seventeenth century story of the Van Brunts under the Van Warts, including a Jeremias Van Brunt who, like Walter, loses a foot, and his son Wouter, whose betrayal of his own people is echoed three hundred years later. Walter, true to the family, is headed for a betrayal of his own.

The novel is long and crowded, and the pleasure is in Boyle's language: loud, funny, packed with period detail and in love with its own energy. Kirkus said the book "takes the breath away, awes with its breadth and mastery," though it thought the book declined toward the end, with Walter too thin a hero to drive it and the Van Wart villains stock types. Publishers Weekly called it "a triumph; resonant, richly imagined and written with unfailing eloquence." Readers who like Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, and do not mind keeping a family tree in their heads, will have a very good time.