Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.
“Origin” marks the fifth outing for Harvard Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.
“Origin” marks the fifth outing for Harvard professor Robert Langdon, the symbologist who uncovered stunning secrets and shocking conspiracies in “The Da Vinci Code” and Brown’s other phenomenally best-selling novels. All the worn-out elements of those earlier books are dragged out once again for Brown to hyperventilate over like some grifter trying to fence fake antiques.
This time around, the requisite earth-shattering secret is a discovery made by Edmond Kirsch, a computer genius with a flair for dramatic presentations and infinite delays. Kirsch has called the world’s intelligentsia to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where he plans to reveal his findings to the world because. . . .
Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.
“Origin” marks the fifth outing for Harvard professor Robert Langdon, the symbologist who uncovered stunning secrets and shocking conspiracies in “The Da Vinci Code” and Brown’s other phenomenally best-selling novels. All the worn-out elements of those earlier books are dragged out once again for Brown to hyperventilate over like some grifter trying to fence fake antiques.
This time around, the requisite earth-shattering secret is a discovery made by Edmond Kirsch, a computer genius with a flair for dramatic presentations and infinite delays. Kirsch has called the world’s intelligentsia to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where he plans to reveal his findings to the world because. . . .
In 1949, when Danielle Steel was just a toddler, Theodor Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
It took her a while, but SIn 1949, when Danielle Steel was just a toddler, Theodor Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
It took her a while, but Steel has proved Adorno’s point. Not that there’s anything poetic about her new Holocaust novel, “Only the Brave,” but using the Final Solution as the setting for a sentimental melodrama is profoundly unseemly. It’s not good for the Jews. It’s not good for anybody.
But the publicity machine grinds on.
Half a century ago, Steel published her first book, “Going Home,” and over the decades she’s become one of the best-selling novelists in the world, with more than a billion copies in print. Perhaps no other writer is so widely read and so rarely reviewed. It’s a confirmed blind spot in our critical landscape: Unlike music, movie and TV reviewers, book reviewers pride themselves on avoiding what most people are consuming. Sometimes, I feel guilty about this. At the moment, I feel grateful.
By my count, “Only the Brave” is Steel’s 152nd novel, but her publicist tells me, “It is closer to her 170th.” Apparently, the actual number can only be guessed at in the same way the total mass of dark matter in the universe is estimated by how it bends light. With some certainty, though, we can determine that “Only the Brave” is one of seven titles Steel plans to release this year, which means that she writes a book more often than most people clean their fridge.
In the months leading up to this week’s publication, Steel’s publicist reached out repeatedly to insist that I not mention the author is a 76-year-old romance novelist. As always, we’re never ashamed of the right things.
“Only the Brave” opens in Berlin in 1937 with one of the book’s typically perplexing observations: “Even at eighteen,” Steel writes, “Sophia Alexander knew that things in Germany had changed in the past four years since the Nazis had come to power.” Yes, nothing gets by our Sophia. Somehow, after Hitler established himself as a dictator, passed the Nuremberg Laws and remilitarized the Rhineland, this savvy young woman has managed to pick up a change in the air. That weird consummation of obviousness and obliviousness quickly becomes the novel’s prevailing tone. . . .
In a political roman à clef, anonymity can leave a lot to be desired. When “Primary Colors” appeared in 1996, the rabid quest to identify its author (In a political roman à clef, anonymity can leave a lot to be desired. When “Primary Colors” appeared in 1996, the rabid quest to identify its author (Joe Klein) outshone the novel’s sharp satire of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. In 2011, when someone — reportedly John McCain’s speechwriter Mark Salter — published “O,” about Barack Obama, anonymity was its most exciting element.
Vinson Cunningham, a former assistant in the Obama White House, subverts that sly mystery. “Great Expectations,” his boldly titled debut novel about a presidential campaign, proclaims Cunningham’s name but never names the candidate. Considering how specifically Obama is described in these pages, readers may find that omission cute, but it’s more than that. There’s a prevailing sense in “Great Expectations” that the eloquent Black politician from Illinois, “projecting an intimacy that was more astral than real,” is too indeterminate to be named. He’s a Rorschach test for America.
The first time “the Senator” appears in these pages — in 2007 during “a reception at a music producer’s apartment” — the room reorients itself around the candidate’s magnetism. Cunningham, a drama critic at the New Yorker, immediately demonstrates how attentive he is to the mannered theatricality of politics and particularly to....
The Canadian poet Anne Michaels publishes novels so deliberately that each one entrances readers of a new decade. Her debut novel, “Fugitive Pieces,” The Canadian poet Anne Michaels publishes novels so deliberately that each one entrances readers of a new decade. Her debut novel, “Fugitive Pieces,” which tells the story of a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis, appeared in 1996 and won a host of awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, “The Winter Vault,” about the construction of two civil engineering projects large enough to alter history, was published in 2009.
Michaels’s fans — an intense group that should be larger — will recognize the atmosphere of longing that pervades her gorgeous new novel, “Held.” It’s a story that explores the way intense intimacy manages to thrive in vernal pools of calm during eras of grief and tumult. Perhaps the word “romantic” has been too thoroughly attenuated to use in praise, but “Held” may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read.
It’s also one of the most poetic — not just in sentiment but in form. “Held” unfolds in short blocks. One is tempted to call them stanzas. Some are just a couple of lines; others extend for a few pages. Many of these sections demand bridging elisions, catching thematic echoes and restitching a. . . .
“Let Us Descend,” the title of Jesmyn Ward’s overwhelming new novel, alludes to Dante’s “Inferno,” but her story tells the tale of a real hell on eart“Let Us Descend,” the title of Jesmyn Ward’s overwhelming new novel, alludes to Dante’s “Inferno,” but her story tells the tale of a real hell on earth. In one sense, that’s long been Ward’s setting. In “Salvage the Bones,” which won a National Book Award in 2011, she described a poor Black family in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina. In “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” which won another National Book Award in 2017, she described the notorious Parchman Farm, where Southern slavery was effectively re-legalized for the 20th century.
Now, Ward has moved further back in time to focus on the United States’ original sin, the peculiar institution that managed to reify every circle of Dante’s “Inferno.” Here, in “Let Us Descend” are enslaved Black women close enough to the birth of America to have heard directly about the horrors of the Middle Passage and even the nature of life on the African continent.
And yet, for all its boundless suffering, this is a novel of triumph.
It begins, appropriately, with battle training. Young Annis, who narrates the story in an urgent hush, is the daughter of her White enslaver and her enslaved mother. Once a month, at night, when their labor is finally done, Annis and her mother practice fighting with spears in. . . .
“God: An Anatomy,” by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, has won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The U.K. award, worth about $2,500, honors the best nonfiction “God: An Anatomy,” by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, has won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The U.K. award, worth about $2,500, honors the best nonfiction book on any historical subject.
“God,” like God, offers a host of surprising revelations. And the timing of this award — in the season of Christmas and Hanukkah — feels strangely ordained.
Although Stavrakopoulou is an atheist, she’s fascinated, even perturbed, by what Christians and Jews have done to God. In ancient times, she notes, God had a body, “a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking” physique.
But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.”
Her investigation, more like a reclamation, takes her through the Bible text to lift up, pick apart and examine the very physical body of the supreme being described there: his feet, his hands, his face, even his private parts. What do they look like? What are the dimensions, the vital signs and especially the implications for those who organized their lives around Him? (And it’s definitely Him.)
In 1998, Russell Banks published an incendiary epic called “Cloudsplitter” about John Brown and his abolition cause. A finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, In 1998, Russell Banks published an incendiary epic called “Cloudsplitter” about John Brown and his abolition cause. A finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, the novel felt like thunder in print. It remains the pinnacle — but certainly not the end — of Banks’s remarkable efforts to capture the moral complications of a radical life.
His new novel, “The Magic Kingdom,” returns again to that theme but in an entirely different register. The violent fury of the abolitionists’ principles has been replaced by the quiet intensity of the Shakers’ faith. Both groups looked aghast at a world intolerably corrupted, and both pursued strategies to utterly transform the status quo. But the Shakers, following the inspiration of Mother Ann Lee, withdrew into their egalitarian, celibate communities. And by setting his story among these outwardly peaceful, inwardly passionate believers, Banks has created another fascinating volume in his exploration of the American experience.
“The Magic Kingdom” is framed as a transcript of old reel-to-reel audiotapes discovered by Banks in the moldy basement of a public library in St. Cloud, Fla. The recordings, we’re told, were made in 1971 in the days after Walt Disney opened his gigantic amusement park in Orlando. The voice on the tapes is that of an elderly....
Last year’s most unlikely bestseller was “Matrix,” a novel by Lauren Groff about an obscure medieval poet named Marie de France and a 12th-century nunLast year’s most unlikely bestseller was “Matrix,” a novel by Lauren Groff about an obscure medieval poet named Marie de France and a 12th-century nunnery. Maybe two years of covid seclusion had primed us for a story of monastic adventure, and certainly Groff’s rich style helped the book sing to many readers. But in addition to her enormous fan base — which includes Barack Obama — the novel succeeded because it eschewed fusty Christian theology and projected modern feminist ideals onto its ancient canvas.
Now comes Emma Donoghue, another popular and critically acclaimed novelist, with “Haven,” a monastic story of her own. But Donoghue has ratcheted up the stakes by taking on a trifecta of bestseller killers: First, she moves the clock back even further, to around 600 A.D. Second, she portrays a culture inhabited only by men. And third, her characters live and move and have their being in an atmosphere fully imbued with their primitive Christian faith.
In short, very few readers have been praying for a novel like this. But “Haven” creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.
The novel opens with a kind of preface set at Cluain Mhic Nóis, a relatively new monastery with about three dozen monks in the center of Ireland. Not 200 years have passed since St. Patrick converted the island to Christianity, but. . . .
Here is one of those reviews — all too common lately — in which I struggle to delay as long as possible the sad news that you should skip this novel.
SHere is one of those reviews — all too common lately — in which I struggle to delay as long as possible the sad news that you should skip this novel.
Such contortions feel especially awkward given that the novelist, Julian Barnes, is one of the world’s finest English writers. In addition to winning a shelf of awards, including a Booker Prize in 2011 for “The Sense of an Ending,” Barnes has published elegant, daring and often witty books that people actually enjoy reading — “Flaubert’s Parrot,” “England, England” and “Arthur and George” among them. Indeed, there was always something magical about Barnes’s ability to make exceedingly erudite subjects deeply engaging.
But now comes “Elizabeth Finch,” whose magic involves making a short book feel like a long one. It isn’t so much a story as a late-night hagiography drunk on distilled irony. Indeed, the only motion through most of these pages is generated by Barnes aggressively winking at us.
This is a tale of idolization, specifically the idolization of a teacher, which should suggest something about the arc of the plot. The narrator, Neil, was once a student in an adult education class called “Culture and Civilisation.” Neil is an actor. He’s bungled two marriages and fathered three children, but those dear ones receive less attention in this story than you might shower on a philodendron.
Instead, Neil remains consumed with his onetime professor, an independent scholar named Elizabeth Finch. “I probably paid more. . . .
The Oppenheimer triplets were conceived in a petri dish, but the real miracle of their creation took place in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s fertile imaginatioThe Oppenheimer triplets were conceived in a petri dish, but the real miracle of their creation took place in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s fertile imagination. These three spoiled scions of a wealthy Brooklyn family are the subject of her sharp new comic novel, “The Latecomer.”
Although it’s set around the end of the 20th century, the story luxuriates in the flourishes of an earlier era, including uncanny coincidences, hidden identities and chapter headings in which the author foreshadows what is about to unfold. Indeed, like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Korelitz simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants. Other readers will hear in this vivisection of a dysfunctional family a Franzenesque attention to the great forces pulsing through American culture. But Korelitz writes with such a light touch that one doesn’t feel strong-armed through a college seminar on, say, pharmaceuticals or bird conservation. (Like her previous novel “The Plot,” “The Latecomer” is already set for a TV series adaptation.)
In the early chapters, Korelitz carefully lays the foundation of a storied Jewish family that can trace its roots — and its misfortunes — back to . . . .
I would never have believed that I’d review — and love — a novel that includes recipes. But Michelle Huneven’s “Search” and her Midmorning Glory MuffiI would never have believed that I’d review — and love — a novel that includes recipes. But Michelle Huneven’s “Search” and her Midmorning Glory Muffins have made me a believer. Which is appropriate because “Search” is a story about the evolving nature of belief.
Others, though, may feel skeptical about entering this explicitly religious novel. After all, “Search” is about a church looking for a new minister. The chapters present a long series of committee meetings — a plot that could test the faith of even the most devout reader, despite the inclusion of Escarole Salad with Favas, Mint, and Pecorino. Indeed, in summary “Search” sounds weirdly ecclesial and culinary, like Marilynne Robinson with a light vinaigrette.
Behold: What follows isn’t so much a review as an act of evangelicalism.
Huneven’s narrator, Dana, is a restaurant critic and memoirist who belongs to a Unitarian Universalist Church in Arroyo, Calif. The wealthy, highly educated group of about 300 members is liberal to a fault, more devoted to diversity than divinity: Atheists Welcome! They’re wholly focused on social action and generally uncomfortable with Jesus-talk. By some heavenly coincidence, the church goes by its initials AUUCC, pronounced “awk.”
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was not a household name in the United States when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature. It didn’t help that the SPolish author Olga Tokarczuk was not a household name in the United States when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature. It didn’t help that the Swedish Academy centered its praise on “The Books of Jacob,” an arduous-sounding novel that wasn’t available in English.
It especially didn’t help that the academy announced Tokarczuk’s award along with the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peter Handke, an Austrian writer sympathetic to Yugoslavia’s late genocidal leader, Slobodan Milosevic. That controversy sucked up attention for days and risked rendering Tokarczuk merely “the other winner.”
But nothing should overshadow Tokarczuk’s literary presence in the United States now. “The Books of Jacob” is finally available here in a wondrous English translation by Jennifer Croft, and it’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing “the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.” In terms of its scope and ambition, “The Books of Jacob” is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. Even its voluminous subtitle is a witty expression of Tokarczuk’s irrepressible, omnivorous reach. . . .
Limping through a worldwide pandemic spiked with fresh threats of nuclear war, you may be craving a book to cheer you up.
Look away!
Steve Toltz’s grim Limping through a worldwide pandemic spiked with fresh threats of nuclear war, you may be craving a book to cheer you up.
Look away!
Steve Toltz’s grim comic novel “Here Goes Nothing” hangs on the gallows humor of a whole condemned race. Every copy of this book should come with a starter dose of Prozac.
An Australian author who lives in Los Angeles, Toltz attracted an international audience with his chaotic debut, “A Fraction of the Whole,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008. His second novel, “Quicksand,” also careened through an absurd catalogue of misfortunes. And now with “Here Goes Nothing,” he’s taken his misanthropic shtick into the Great Beyond.
We meet the narrator, Angus, when he’s already dead. The grave has clarified one important theological point — if only by failing to bring everything to a close. In life, Angus admits, he was sure that “the very notion of an immortal soul was only a way to avoid facing our imminent trip to Nowhere. It’s humiliating how wrong you can be.”
Our holiday stories are so cloyingly flavored with sugar plums that Claire Keegan’s Christmas novella tastes especially fresh. At the opening of “SmalOur holiday stories are so cloyingly flavored with sugar plums that Claire Keegan’s Christmas novella tastes especially fresh. At the opening of “Small Things Like These,” one immediately senses that Keegan is breathing something vital into the season’s most cherished tales, until, as gently as snow falling, her little book accrues the unmistakable aura of a classic.
The scene opens in New Ross, on the coast of Ireland. In just a few pages, the town rises up in all its picturesque antiquity with a web of economic and social tensions thrumming beneath the surface. It’s 1985, and New Ross is enduring a grinding decline. With businesses shuttered, the dole lines are long and the houses cold. Those who can leave have already skipped abroad looking for work, life.
Keegan’s Everyman hero is Bill Furlong, whose past and present she sketches with such crisp efficiency that the brush marks of her artistry are almost invisible. Furlong knows he’s. . . .
The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence” may be theThe coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence” may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet.
Such is the mystery of Erdrich’s work, and “The Sentence” is among her most magical novels, switching tones with the felicity of a mockingbird. She notes that the Native American language of her ancestors “includes intricate forms of human relationships and infinite ways to joke,” and she fully explores that spectrum in these pages: A zany crime caper gives way to the horrors of police brutality; lives ruined flip suddenly into redemption; the deaths of half-a-million Americans play out while a grumpy ghost causes mischief. But the abiding presence here is love.
And books — so many books. This is a novel packed to its spine with other books. I was keeping track of each one mentioned until I discovered Erdrich’s appendix, which lists more than 150 beloved titles. Be prepared: “The Sentence” is that rare novel about the life-transforming effect of literature that arrives with its own. . . .
Best-selling author Mitch Albom is back from heaven and ready to consider the mystery of divine intervention on earth.
God help us.
Albom’s latest inspiBest-selling author Mitch Albom is back from heaven and ready to consider the mystery of divine intervention on earth.
God help us.
Albom’s latest inspirational melodrama is called “The Stranger in the Lifeboat.” It’s a survivor story about 10 people trapped on a raft with a young man who announces, “I am the Lord.”
Think of it as Tuesdays with Yahweh. If nothing else, this book has made me understand that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years.
We meet these imperiled castaways drifting at sea. They were all guests or workers on a massive yacht owned by billionaire Jason Lambert. He had gathered technology pioneers, corporate leaders, glitzy celebrities and even former presidents for a week-long adventure to “spur each other to change the world” — a cruise version of Davos.
In the opening pages, we learn that the yacht exploded and sank in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa. All are presumed lost because somehow this massive gathering of the world’s richest and most powerful people was unaccompanied by any attendant ships. If that little implausibility troubles you, you haven’t got a prayer here. . . .
Thank God for Jonathan Franzen. His new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first of a planned trilogy modestly called “A Key to All Mythologies.” With its daThank God for Jonathan Franzen. His new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first of a planned trilogy modestly called “A Key to All Mythologies.” With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, “Crossroads” is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a marked evolution, a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy.
This time around, the celebrated chronicler of the Way We Live Now is exploring the Way We Lived Then — notably the early 1970s. And the gaping jaw of his earlier novels, capable of swallowing a vast body of cultural trends and commercial ills, has been replaced by a laser-eyed focus on the flutterings of the soul.
Before now, “soul” is not a term I would have associated with Franzen, whose brilliant, acerbic work has seemed committed to a purely material concept of human identity. But “Crossroads” feels consumed with the Psalmist’s question, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?”
The story revolves around Rev. Russ Hildebrandt, an associate pastor at an active Protestant church in suburban Chicago. When the novel opens, 47-year-old Russ is still smarting from the brutal cancelation of. . . .
If “Matrix” were written by anyone else, it would be a hard sell. But Lauren Groff is one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed fiction writersIf “Matrix” were written by anyone else, it would be a hard sell. But Lauren Groff is one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed fiction writers in the country. And now that we’ve endured almost two years of quarantine and social distancing, her new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely.
Still, a medieval abbess is a challenging heroine — living, as she does, a millennium away from us, suspended in that dim historical period long after the Romans but centuries before Shakespeare. We need a trusted guide, someone who can dramatize this remote period while making it somehow relevant to our own lives.
Groff is that guide largely because she knows what to leave out. Indeed, it’s breathtaking how little ink she spills on filling in historical context. Details about the court of King Henry II are omitted as though the Angevin Empire were as familiar to contemporary Americans as Westeros. What you might already know about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Second Crusade — probably little — will not be much increased by reading “Matrix.” And though it covers more than 50 tumultuous years, this entire novel wraps up in the space it would take Ken Follett to warm a cauldron of gruel. . . .
One hundred years ago, a play titled “R.U.R.,” by Karel Capek, debuted in Prague and gave us the word “robot.” Since then, androids have been dreamingOne hundred years ago, a play titled “R.U.R.,” by Karel Capek, debuted in Prague and gave us the word “robot.” Since then, androids have been dreaming of electric sheep, and we’ve been having nightmares about the robot apocalypse. But calamity rarely comes in the neat, clarifying ways we fear.
Leave it to Kazuo Ishiguro to articulate our inchoate anxieties about the future we’re building. “Klara and the Sun,” his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Readers still reeling from his 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go” will find here a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements. But if the weird complications of technology frame the plot, the real subject, as always in Ishiguro’s dusk-lit fiction, is the moral quandary of the human heart.
Klara, the narrator of this genre-straddling novel, is an Artificial Friend (AF), a popular class of androids designed to provide companionship to teenagers. Why young people would need artificial companionship is one of the chilling questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental.
When we meet Klara, she (it?) is on display in something like the Apple Store, an elegant retail shop catering to well-heeled parents. Older AFs such as Klara rotate with the latest models, competing for attention based on their specifications and social cachet. Klara’s particular skill is. . . .
That question, braided with romance and religion, is at the heart of Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Jack.”
Since 2Can love save a man from perdition?
That question, braided with romance and religion, is at the heart of Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Jack.”
Since 2004 when she published “Gilead,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, Robinson has been exploring the lives of two families led by Protestant ministers in a fictional Iowa town. These thoughtful novels are not sequels in the traditional sense, but they’re part of the same chord; they depend upon one another for tone and resonance. “Jack,” the fourth Gilead novel and the first to leave Iowa entirely behind, is particularly dependent on those previous books. If you’re tempted to read them out of order, be warned: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way.” “Jack” rests on what came before, and its poignancy arises from what we know lies ahead for these characters.
This time around, Robinson is working in a real city, St. Louis, after World War II. The story focuses closely on John Ames Boughton — Jack — the errant son of Rev. Boughton. A thief, an alcoholic and a confirmed cad, Jack has fled the forgiving arms of his family but still carries the burden of their hope. Leaving home and his father’s forbearance hasn’t helped him escape the vexation of being a pious man’s son. He’s been teetering on the edge of suicide, determined “to stay alive as long as. . . .
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