Force of Gravity

By R.S. Jones

Book Overview

Paranoid yet judiciously reasonable, innocent yet calculating, strange yet strangely endearing, Emmet Barfield finds the world around him looming larger and larger the more he struggles to make his way within it. With Emmet as our guide, Force of Gravity transforms the world through a solitary consciousness until the reader's perceptions become as inverted as if seen through a modern version of Alice's looking glass. Emmet's world is a place where shopping in a market requires the cunning of a carefully considered crime, where a bustling city street in summer appears as desolate as a forgotten wasteland, where a stray cat adopted for company becomes as menacing as one's darkest foe, and where a mother and son riding a ski lift suddenly find themselves dizzy with the threat of death. Through his eyes, the world becomes newly alive with the terrible vividness and weird beauty of an undiscovered territory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060511303
• ISBN13: 9780060511302
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

an artfully-written novel, both hilarious and horrifying

I'm so glad to see this book in print again. This is a truly literary novel, stylistically brilliant and original. It's subject is Emmett, the oddly charming central character's, mental disintegration, which sounds dreary, but manages not to be, both because of the fresh, exciting writing, and the cool wit with which Jones conveys the horror of Emmett's predicament. The mental ward scenes at the core of the book are as funny as they are scary, which is saying a lot. Although mental illness is the novel's most overt subject, I read it more as a subtle exploration of of the relationship between emotional sensitivity and florid paranoia. I hesitated over the 5-star rating, but the book's undeserved obscurity and my happiness at seeing it available again swayed me in that direction.