Hudson River Doomsong
Michael Dolan
Washington DC

One of the Hudson River's charm&is the fact that for much of the way between New York City and Albany a passenger railroad track hugs the huge stream's eastern edge, affording a spectacular view made more of a spectacle by the river's writhings. Near Ossining,, for example, the shoreline flares so extravagantly that a traveler seated at a waterward window can look forward at the locomotive, then glance aft at the caboose, as the train plays parenthesis to the dull green river, wide as an inland sea and deep as history.

In World's End, a novel named for the Hudson's deepest and deadliest spot, T. Coraghessan Boyle perches like that passenger, scanning back and forth through time to watch the engine of destiny drag the caboose of fate along the great river. Boyle, a brawling and prodigious logophile, so far has lurked at the Pynchonesque periphery of American letters. No more. With this book he launches himself at the circle of such as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner.

In earlier books-the novels Budding Prospects and Water Music and the short story collections Descent of Man and Greasy Lake-Boyle displayed finesse with the jab and the fake; scuffler's tools, but useful and entertaining nonetheless. Prospects is a present-day bleak comedy of disaster spawned by an attempt at marijuana cultivation in Mendocino. Music is an 18th-century adventure about African exploration and the fatal effects on a white man of shouldering his presumptuous burden.
Until now Boyle's work has seesawed between terror and hilarity. with occasional stops at tenderness and optimism, as in the finale of Prospects. He's an eminently readable writer, but he's been prone so far to excess of erudition, like a lit major desperate to make his bones as a Kunstler.

But short stories and picaresques are sparring matches, and in a sparring match it's all right to overplay one's fist. With World's End Boyle shows he can slug his way through 15 rounds of Big Book, setting aside his dandyism and forgoing his punchlines to wrestle with big themes. Like Warren and Faulkner (and Twain and Kesey, for that matter), Boyle is dealing this time out in the intertwined, ineluctable fates of sons and fathers. jackknifing between the 17th and 20th centuries, he tells a dark tale of crime and punishment and treachery and revenge in which the deadly flaw is blood, and the mandatory sentence is life.

World's End is populated with Dutchmen and their descendants, Indians in like number, occasional Englishmen, and the random Frenchman and Yankee, all roiling around the fecund middle Hudson Valley that spawned Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman-and T. C. Boyle. Don't be daunted by the opening list of principal characters (34 in the 17th century; 19 in the 20th); besides having the chops to jumpcut 200 years without losing his train of thought, Boyle is capable of juggling this crew like Blondin with a bushel of apples and oranges.

Punctuated now and again by giddy gallows humor, World's End rumbles threateningly, like thunder over Storm King Mountain. Earlier Boyle-the short stories "In for the Long Haul" and "Greasy Lake," for example-has had the same tone, but never in so appropriate. or as consistent a measure as he wields it here.
One reason Boyle's fictional doomsong works so well is that threnody is a familiar tune along the actual Hudson. Even on a sunny day in mid-August, when from the peak of Storm King West Point seems arrayed like a Lionel layout, the,river has a poisonous gleam.

Boyle knows this. His Hudson-he grew up in the area, and writes with the native's sense 4 turf and terrainisn't the cheery stuff of which "I V NY" advertisements are made, but the unforgiving torrent that once swallowed a Bear Mountain excursion boat, killing a thousand picnickers. Boyle's Hudson flows past decaying towns like Newburgh, looking placid on the surface but ready at a whim to suck a ship down 230 cruel feet to World's End, where, he writes, "rotting spars groaned in a current that was like the wind and from which no body had even been recovered, deepest hole in a river that rarely ran more than a hundred feet deep." Boyle's Hudson has absorbed ichor of every sort, whether from dispossessed Indians and failed settlers or from drowned sailors and striking workers or that spilled at the Peterskill riots of 1949, when right-wing patriots helped usher in the Age of McCarthy by stomping a crowd of progressives who'd come to hear a folk-music concert by Peter Seeger and Paul Robeson.

The Peterskill Riots figure prominently in World's End. So does the murderous river, along with demonic possession, filial devotion, and the inevitable failure of fathers to live up to their sons' expectations (the terse dedication: "In memory of my own lost father"). Along the way Boyle illuminates not only his characters and their motivations, but our language. He has channeled his dogged research and accompanying flamboyance into the region's history and etymology, peeling back the layers of familiarity to reveal the Netherlandic origins of such as "Harlem" and "Dutch courage," and the New World roots of such as "Manhattan." Readers of World's End won't ever hear the word "Mohawk" in quite the same way. Nor "Mohonk," nor "Canarsie," nor "patroon," nor "stoop," nor scores of others.

Boyle's plottings for each century track one another as economically as a rock skipped on water tracks its reflection, and his pacing is spartan. Scarcely a disaster befalls a character in the 17th century that is not echoed somehow in the 20th, but all within reason, and all in the service of advancing the story. Boyle wallows occasionally in his thesaurean verbal facility, but let the boy rock 'n'roll; why'd Mr. Webster put those big'uns in the dictionary if we weren't supposed to buff 'em now and again? Rich to the point of surfeit, the language and sentence structure of World's End themselves add to the hallucinatory state of its central character and of the region in which he lives.

Boyle tells the story of the unholy and unbreakable thread linking the Van Brunts and the Van Warts, each a clan dating to the Dutch ascendancy, and the Kitchawanks, a sorry and all-but-exterminated Indian tribe once native to the land around what is now Peterskill. The Van Brunts are luckless peasants destroyed generation upon generation by a propensity for lickspittle toadying; the Van Warts, luckless patroons protected through the same generations only by the class system. In the 17th century the toadying and lording over take place in the context of the feudal baronies into which the valley was divided by the Dutch; in the 20th, the toadying, lording over,, and feudalism are the same, only transferred to a modern factory town. As for the Kitchawanks, they fare the same in either century, having barely managed to avoid extinction when their only competition was other Indians, never mind an onslaught by rapacious white invaders. In the end, though, the revenge of the last Kitchawank is the blood knot that ties together the tale, offering a slim opportunity at uplift amid the wrecked lives and ruined chances of the Van Warts and Van Brunts.

Bootwearer and bootlicker, aborigine and interloper, the inhabitants of World's End blunder through Boyle's universe dimly cognizant of- its patterns until Walter Van Brunt, the last of his line, finally breaks through his visions to perceive the whole sick choreography in a confrontation with his disgraced and self-exiled father. Understanding the labanotation isn't enough to keep Walter from the dance, however, and he follows in his father's figurative footsteps to a literally frozen demise that violates the writing teacher's cardinal rule; to whit: Don't spend a whole book developing a character and then kill him off.

But Boyle-a veteran teacher of the art and sullen craft-is entitled to break the rules; Walter Van Brunt's traitorous end is such a sure thing that the novel derives its central tension not from speculation about whether he'll die, but how. Boyle's accomplishment lies in the way he convinces us on every page that the denouement is worth the dive through and to World's End.