The Ruins

By Trace Farrell

Set among the spinning cogs and wheels of a lavish dinner club for the "gastronomical Elect," The Ruins is a black-eyed, Machiavellian fairy tale for adults, a gleeful cautionary discourse on ambition and ingratitude, and the penalties for disbelief in those forces within oneself.
Like all fairy tales, it turns on subjection-the increasingly comic and catastrophic subjection of "our hero, Tom," a high-minded and half-starved shoeshine boy. Tom shifts for himself in a dank and vaguely apocalyptic city where "the days come and go in a flat, lurid tide, noon and midnight like sullen twins, so indifferently does light distinguish itself from darkness."
Easily enticed from the artless squalor of his past into the dazzling and treacherous table politics of TheRuins, our hero soon finds himself at escalating odds with the diabolical proprietor, Jones, "an extravagant if charismatic crackpot." Tom's ill-fated efforts to reform The Ruins-finally and improbably rewarded at the glittering Fool's Ball-lead him on a devastating rise and illustrious tumble to humility, humanity, and practical grace.
In the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Trace Farrell delivers this highly original first novel with the arch rhetoric and insinuating charm of a seasoned carnival barker. Slyly drawing the eye to a world teeming with life, after all, no more horrid than gorgeous, The Ruins marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814726852
• ISBN13: 9780814726853
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 4.8" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Kornreich didn't get it!

Like a writer of "experimental" fiction (whatever that means exactly), Farrell forces a suspension or confusion of expectations; but, she also creates incredible, lush images and wonderful characters and you'll probably want to read THE RUINS in a single sitting. The book made me think of Peter Greenaway movies crossed with CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES thrown into the mind of a re-gendered 21st century Laurence Sterne.

Fabulous and funny first novel

From other reviews I expected this work to be in the vein of pulp fantasy; it isn't that at all. While it has some of the characteristics of a fable it switches from fantastic narrative to funny dialogue through extravagant circumstance. The dialogue had me laugh aloud and the language often made me want to read out loud.