World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Book Overview

Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter van Brunt is about to have a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140299939
• ISBN13: 9780140299939
• Release Date: July 1990
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

book review

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.

local and universal

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.

Big family saga minus the cheap melodrama

T C Boyle's Pen/Faulkner Award winning novel "World's End" looks like a daunting read. It's after all over 450 pages long and boasts a cast of characters that spans several generations and makes Tolstoy's "War and Peace" seem like a cosy family drama. It's hard work initially figuring out who's who and this is complicated by Boyle making us jump backwards and forwards alternating between the 17th and 20th Century, but once you get into a groove, it's no sweat. "World's End" is a multigenerational family saga with all the pyrotechnics you'd expect but Boyle expertly skirts and avoids melodrama. The themes of real estate, power, race, class and betrayal are worked to their fullest and the effect is nothing short of stunning. All quite old fashionedly powerful stuff except for Boyle's quirky sense of humour (eg, Walter van Brunt's accidents) that nudges the novel somewhere left field. Boyle's own empathy for the hippy movement of the 1960s also lends an authencity to the "present day" developments. The novel is really about Walter's search for his mysteriously missing black sheep of a father, Truman - an enigma till the end - and as he drives himself and others crazy discovering his past and how the histories of three feuding clans are inextricably bound by blood, hatred and deceit, he comes face to face with the shocking truth that in three hundred years, nothing changes and humanity is powerless against the forces that threaten to engulf them. Boyle is a great storyteller. His prose is exotic, colourful, always compelling and a joy to read. Reading "World's End" takes commitment and dedication but the reward makes it all worthwhile. This is one novel nobody who loves serious literature should miss. Highly recommended.

shed his grace on (some) of thee

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.

T.C. Boyle's finest work.

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.)