Books of The Times
Michiko Kakutani
New York Times, Sept. 23, 1987

With two previous novels ("Water Music" and "Budding Prospects") and two short-story collections ("Descent of Man," "Greasy Lake and Other Stories"), T. Coraghessan Boyle has emerged as one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation. Rather than using his gifts to create polite mirrors of contemporary reality, he has chosen, like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, to mix up naturalism with large doses of hyperbole and metaphor to create storybook collages that comment on older forms of literature even as they reinvent essential American myths. In his latest novel, a vast and wordy epic that spans four centuries and more than 400 pages, he attempts not only to examine the implications of the American Dream, as he's done in earlier works, but also to tackle the complicated issues of freedom, class and race involved in the founding of our nation.

A native of Peekskill, N.Y., Mr. Boyle has taken as his setting the lovely countryside of the Hudson River Valley, and he's selected the works of Washington Irving as a literary antecedent. In addition to bearing a family name familiar to readers of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," his hero, one Walter Van Brunt, will undergo a series of adventures that recall those of famous Irving characters. Like Ichabod Crane, Walter (as well as his ancestors) suffers from an eating disorder. Like Crane, he has a mysterious encounter with a specter that results in a terrible accident. And like Rip Van Winkle, he becomes an unwitting time traveler - though instead of journeying into the future like Rip, he will meet up with ghosts from his past, ghosts that will drag him back into the muck and confusion of ancient family history.

Walter's motorcycle accident, which is described in terms reminiscent of Ichabod Crane's run-in with the headless horseman, results in the loss of his foot; and while recuperating in the hospital, he has a visit from his long-lost father, Truman - or so he imagines. In the ensuing weeks and months he becomes increasingly obsessed with his father's bizarre disappearance and the elusive truth of his life.
Is it true, as Walter's adoptive parents have always told him, that Truman was a traitor - an informer, who sold out his family and Socialist friends during the violent, anti-left Peterskill riots of 1949? Is it true he cold-bloodedly abandoned Walter and his mother, driving off in a car owned by the right-wing tyrant Depeyster Van Wart? What role in all this was played by Truman's secret manuscript titled "Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt"? And how were the fates of Walter and Truman prefigured by the destinies of their ancestors?

As Walter sets off in search of answers to these questions, his daily life begins to unravel: a few days after his wedding, he finds himself tumbling into a messy affair with Mardi Van Wart, the disaffected daughter of his boss, Depeyster; he discovers that his wife, Jessica, is having an affair with his hippie friend, Tom Crane; he loses his remaining foot in another accident; and he has a disturbing talk with a dwarf who alledgedly knows his father's secret. These events take place sometime in the late 60's, and as he did in "Budding Prospects," Mr. Boyle uses his quick, ironic command of sociological detail to both evoke and satirize a disturbed America in which, as he once wrote, "rape, murder, cannibalism, political upheaval in the Third World, rock-and-roll, unemployment, puppies, mothers, Jackie, Michael, Liza" are incapable of inducing a reaction.

Interspersed in alternating chapters with these recent events is Mr. Boyle's account of what happened to Walter's ancestors - an account, set down in the same noisy, colloquial prose used in the contemporary portions of the book. It's a convoluted and often incongruous story, detailing the intertwined lives of the, Van Brunts; their landlords, the Van Warts, and a tribe of Kitchawank Indians who live on the same land. In relating how past generations of these three families betrayed one another and intermarried, Mr. Boyle deliberately sets up a series of incidents that foreshadow later events: an earlier Van Brunt, for instance, loses a foot in a freak accident much like Walter's, just as another Van Brunt commits a shocking act of betrayal, comparable to Truman's alleged crime.

Certainly this historical echo chamber gives Mr. Boyle plenty of opportunity to explore his interests in propagation and the development of the species (already evinced in "Budding Prospects" and "Descent of Man"), as well as a chance to score various points about the problematic evolution of American democracy.

Unfortunately, many of those points - that white men stole the Indians'land, that the upper classes have always distrusted the left - are simplistic and poorly delineated. Worse, there's something mechanical and cumbersome about Mr. Boyle's orchestration of time past and time present: his subsidiary characters (in both the 17th and 20th centuries) proliferate in such profusion that we never really get a chance to know them as recognizable individuals, and even Walter's tale begins to sound increasingly contrived. Instead of feeling that he's living out some inexorable family destiny, we end up suspecting that he is just another pawn in the author's elaborate chess game.

Still, there's much to enjoy in this volume. "World's End" gives Mr. Boyle lots of room to display his manic gift for language, his love of exaggeration and Grand Guignol effects, his ability to work all sorts of magical variations on literature and history. It's just that, in this case, the end product doesn't do full justice to those talents.