World's End

Love this book despite the number of characters to follow and the different time frames. Boyle is a really interesting writer who paints a great picture of the times and the particular part of America that is not often written about.

This book is all about the struggles of mankind. In a way it is about class struggles, family struggles and life through the generations, but it doesn't read that way. It comes off as a great depiction of two notable dutch families in the hudson valley. It has engaging characters which keep a sort of continuity through the generations. Very well done, and especially interesting if you are dutch, live in the hudson valley region in new york, or have other ties to colonial america or earlier.

Boyle shows us with breathtaking style how the powerful stay powerful and the powerless stay powerless. By writing about the same two families in both the 17th and the 20th centuries and spelling out in shattering detail how little changed their social relations are, Boyle gives the American Dream a good dope slap. Anyone who finds this book boring or hard to follow needs to stop watching so much television and get an attention span.Boyle was one angry young writer and I think his venom has ebbed somewhat over the years, which is a good thing for him personally, but might cost his writing. I stopped reading him at _Road to Wellville_, which I thought was silly, but after hearing a recent interview with him about _Riven Rock_, I may try to catch up.I think that _World's End_ is his best book because it is about his hometown. Maybe he has lived in southern California long enough now to write about that area and its people just as well.

Having, over the years, enjoyed T.C Boyle's numerous short stories in "The New Yorker," I recently picked up a few of his novels, including: "Water Music," a hysterical, bodice-ripping romp through 18th century England, and that too-proud nation's declaration of ownership over every tract of land it's countrymen set foot in -- even when their explorers are speared to death by natives; "The Road to Wellville," another very funny (and historically significant) statement on America's obsession with all things healthy, and finally, Boyle's watershed work, "World's End." Many readers and reviewers toss off Boyle as a simple satarist -- and they do have a valid, if simple, argument. But with "World's End," Boyle reaches beyond stereotypes and puts his language-drunk prose to it's best purpose, creating a vivid cast of credible, and complex, multi-generational carachters -- many with GOOD points, as well as bad. This novel is fairly dripping with history, languidly lapsing from the 1600s to the 1960s and back, prompting smiles, laughter and the occasional fit of anger. "World's End" is no simple satire. It's a fully drawn, breathing work of literary art. It became my favorite novel by page 5, and I am anxious to read it again, once I've been through the rest of the Boyle canon. (NOTE: of his short stories, "Filthy With Things" is a particular favorite of mine; it must hold some significance for T.C. as well, being the final work in his recently released anthology.)