Description
Dale Peck's second novel offers a searing, nuanced portrait of a marriage across the decades. Beatrice and Henry'the parents of the protagonist of Peck's debut novel, Martin and John'are first drawn together when the teenaged Henry is battling a brain tumor that he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they're still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again. Peck bisects the story of Henry and Beatrice's marriage with a stunning 50-page memoir about his own father, mother, and three stepmothers, which combines with the primary narrative to build an unforgettable and deeply moving book about the ways that family both creates and destroys us.The Law of Enclosures is the second volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.
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"This lyrical and boldly constructed novel contains a powerful 50-page childhood reminiscence by a narrator named Dale Peck wedged into a bifurcated portrait of a tortured marriage. In his first novel, the well-received Martin and John, Peck used incandescent prose and idiosyncratic narrative shifts to tell a story about family dysfunction and the scourge of AIDS; he goes many giant steps further here. The Dale Peck passages tell searingly of a violently displaced upbringing-abusive father, mother dead when he was only three; three successive stepmothers, each increasingly bizarre. This apparently autobiographical narrative is surrounded by two accounts of a marriage. Each concerns a couple called Henry and Beatrice, and each is set in the 1990s. But onedeals with the couple's early years in Long Island, while the other relates their retirement in the Finger Lakes region. The juxtaposition of these two narratives allows Peck to say much about love, boredom, desire and betrayal. This is writing not as entertainment or an attempt to capture experience, but as an effort to surmount experience, to overcome memory and the lack of it in order to be free. The book's fractured structure seems to be the only form true to the harrowing emotional landscape it encompasses. The "law" of the "enclosures" of the title suggests two interpretations: the breaking of the rules of family trust, and the flouting of the conventions that dictate the form of most novels. Not only an unblinking look at the dark chambers of the human heart, this is also, and above all, a brave artistic gamble-one that, ultimately, comes up spades"--
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