World's End: A T.C. Boyle Classic

World’s End (1987)

By T. C. Boyle

Penguin, 456 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

I enjoy going to League of Women Voters book sales: 50 cents-$1 for paperbacks and two bucks for a hardcover. At a recent sale in Amherst I scored a few titles from favorite authors and works of others I’ve been meaning to read.

 

One of the latter is T.C. Boyle whose World's End was a PEN/Faulkner winner. The back blurb promises, “Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.” And how!  World's End is a sprawling novel that starts in the 17th century and wends its way through the 1960s, all with an eye toward helping Walter uncover his father's role during the “Peterskill” riots of 1949 (Peekskill thinly disguised) Local thugs, American Legion toughs, the KKK, and coopted cops broke up a licensed concert sponsored by then-legal American communists. Had not luck prevailed, more than bloody noses and broken bones would have occurred. One of the mob’s objectives was to lynch African American singer Paul Robeson.

 

It seems a stretch to locate the roots of 20^th century history in 1663, but Boyle is a weaver of connections who wants us to consider what things are bred in the bone. Most of the book is set in New York's Hudson River Valley, but it also detours to the Netherlands and Alaska, involves Native-American tribes, social class conflict, racism, feuding families, and missing limbs. (Yep, missing limbs!)

 

Boyle included a cast of characters for each of the time periods, which you’ll need as 61 play important roles. Unless you grew up in New York State, you might not know it was a Dutch colony for 30 years before the English took control. Dutch influence is why some of New York’s most powerful families bear surnames such Van Buren, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Roosevelt.

 

Most of the novel’s Dutch protagonists are of lesser fame –though Peter Stuyvesant of Manhattan island notoriety gets some play–but they were part of a drama pitting highborn against lowborn. Walter's kin were among the latter, tenant farmers and pioneers who intermarried with Kitchawank (Algonquin) natives, and paid the price if they crossed Van Wart patroons, Dutch office holders, or their allies.

 

You can get bogged down in the names and unfamiliar political dynamics, but Boyle delivers a history lesson that is left out of most textbooks. This is especially case of the Kitchawank, many of whom were mixed bloods of shifting loyalties but increasingly Europeanized lifestyles. Not that that's saying much, as lowborn Dutch lived both close to nature and close to the vest. To simplify, clashes between the Van Warts and the Van Brunts shaped Walter’s life two centuries before he was born. Not that Walter is a prince in the 1960s or even a decent person. It's also the case that the Van Warts are not as mighty as they once were, yet still considered themselves to be. Bred in the bone?

 

Doyle's book is an American tragedy, so not too many characters wear untarnished armor. His countercultural males are largely unwashed, unrealistic, and sexist to the core. The exception is that Boyle has sympathy for the crew of the Arcadia trying to clean up the polluted Hudson. (He is so obviously alluding to the sloop Clearwater and Pete Seeger that one wonders why he bothered with such disguises.) The crew might be the only folks in the book with altruistic motives, no matter what detractors thought of their politics.

 

Walter and others will indeed collide with history.  Such crashes take a toll even if the parties survive (and not all will.) Walter's dilemma, like that of his ancestor Wouter, is an old one that resonates today: Do we repeat history or change it? Do we take a stand or bend the knee? It was happenstance that the Peekskill riots factored into World's End, but I certainly drew comparisons to the January 6th rioters who chose base motives over democratic ones.

 

Boyle’s book was written 36 years ago when the general public's reading habits were more sophisticated and patient than they are today. As such, Boyle saw no need to compromise between literary style and storytelling. It takes time to sort characters, untangle the historical threads, and immerse yourself in the narrative, but it's worth it.

 

Rob Weir

 

Note: The cover is adorned with a wooden shoe, a nod to the Dutch, but also a sly reference to sabots from whence we get the word sabotage. In the early 1800s artisans threatened with job loss hurled sabots into machines.