Word: reader
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Twenty minutes later, we are sitting in Winthrop Park, and the talk turns to poetry. Merwin speaks with the humility of a reader, rather than the assertiveness of an acclaimed writer...
Hang's search for meaning and love trace a path of joy and tragedy, success and rejection. Her self-discovery is at once unnerving and beautiful, taking the reader to "a pond lost in some godforsaken village, in a place where the honking of cars and the whistling of trains is something mysterious, exotic.... A place where a man whips his wife with a flail if she dares lend a few baskets of grain or a few bricks to relatives in need. A strip of land somewhere in [her] country, in the 1980s...
...recognize themselves in Boyle's mirror. The author's characters are self-evidently foolish -- the case does not need 476 pages of proving -- and so two-dimensional that there is no question of caring about them as if they had real blood and real pain. Which leaves a reader of Boyle's cheerful and inoffensive tale asking the deadliest of questions: So what...
...words "I'm elected." She tries for a year or so to keep his dwindling plantation running, then, roiled with love, passion and implacable hatred, sets out on foot to find him. The journey takes her west to Indian country. But it is longer than that; she and the reader have passed into a region of what, if this were a Latin American novel, would be called magic realism. But here there is no green, sun-shot jungle life force, only the fogged, toxic gray of brutish, dying cities...
Films like Blade Runner handle atmospherics of this kind easily. It takes a gifted sleight-of-mind artist to work such phantasmagorical effects in a novel without fuddling or exasperating the reader. Erickson manages the trick expertly. But why the priestly Gestapo of "Church Central" in this alternate America? Because Jefferson was an anticlerical deist for whom a theocratic nation would have been a shaming defeat? Maybe, but trying to decode word-for- word meaning here won't illuminate much. Aeonopolis, the author tells us, is almost impossible to leave: thus a waking nightmare of reason paralyzed, of civility blood...