“It's in the Blood, Walter. It's in the Bones”: T. C. Boyle's World's End

“It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones”: T. C. Boyle’s World’s End and the Burden of the Past

Peter Freese

ABSTRACT

T. C. Boyle’s third novel World’s End (1987) is an accomplished historiographical metafiction whose many-stranded plot unfolds the history of two Dutch immigrant families and the indigenous Kitchawanks in the Hudson Valley in the years between 1663 and 1694 and again in 1968/69. This essay investigates how Boyle uses the actual Peekskill Riots of 1949 as the starting point for a “pastless” would-be hippie’s search for his father and how he embeds this quest in a convoluted chain of events whose extensive timescale of three hundred years is offset by the spatial limitations of a narrowly circumscribed region. The essay then shows how Boyle combines historical accuracy based on personal experience and extensive research with flights of magical inventiveness and how he uses the regional superstition of the Dunderberg Imp as well as recurring intertextual references to the tales of Washington Irving to conflate the real and the magical in the fashion of his admired model Gabriel García Márquez. The essay then demonstrates how Boyle employs eating aberrations from cannibalism and terraphagia to binge eating and starvation to create surprising links between colonial and present events, and how he uses the iterative motif of betrayal to develop a deterministic understanding of history. The essay concludes that Boyle’s idiosyncratic style, which is full of humorous comparisons, unexpected images and extravagant metaphors, is not only used for the satirical unmasking of human pretensions and social aberrations but also for the gradual unfolding of a bleakly pessimistic version of the New World’s past and present and a convincing rejection of the promise of the American Dream.

World’s End was a way of redeeming some of the things from my past; it was an attempt to get some of it back, or at least to explore it, to think about it. […] As a kid I had no notion of the history and tradition of the Hudson Valley. Then eight or nine years ago I began to reread Washington Irving and to absorb the legends and myths surrounding the area. The whole experience brewed up some pretty potent material. In 1983 I spent four months there, working mainly at the Peek- skill Library and going to all the historic sites and homes. (qtd. Brisick)

When, in 1987, T. Coraghessan Boyle published his third novel, World’s End, it was widely received as his breakthrough work. The laudatory reviews ranged from Benjamin De Mott’s praise that “World’s End is a smashing good book, the peak achievement thus far in a career that seems now to have no clear limits” to Michael Dolan’s statement that “with this book [Boyle] launches himself at the circle of such as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner.” And Boyle’s fellow writer Russell Banks admiringly observed: “What knocked me out was the book’s ambition. It took [Boyle] out of the category of witty, clever social satire and put him in another league. He reached for the moon, and maybe he didn’t get it all, but he risked the talent, and that’s a scary thing to do” (qtd. Adams, “T. Coraghessan”). 46 Peter Freese

In contrast to Boyle’s previous novels Water Music (1982), which fictionalizes the eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s adventures in Western Africa, and Budding Prospects (1984), which deals with illegal marijuana farmers in Mendocino County, California, the far-ranging and many-layered story of World’s End, according to Michiko Kakutani, “attempts not only to examine the implications of the American Dream, as [Boyle’s] done in earlier works, but also to tackle the complicated issues of freedom, class and race involved in the found- ing of our nation.” The convoluted story unfolds on Boyle’s home turf, and the central place of action, the town of “Peterskill-on-the-Hudson” (4), is a fictional projection of the City of Peekskill in Westchester County, New York, where Boyle was born in 1948. Boyle confirmed in several interviews that the details of the novel’s action are either taken out of his own contemporary world or are the results of his copious historical research, and he admitted to Justin D. Coffin that “One genius critic said that World’s End is a kind of fictional autobiography. And I loved that, because that’s what it is. I don’t know my genealogy much: I would just rather invent it.” As in many of his novels, the seed from which Boyle develops his story is a particular historical event, the so-called Peekskill Riots of 1949. In the summer of that year, tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was growing and the House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating subversive activities by citizens suspected of Communist ties. In a climate that would soon bloom into what is known as McCarthyism, left-leaning Peekskill citizens dared to schedule a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress with the famous black baritone Paul Robeson in Lakeland Acres, north of the city, for August 27, 1949. Since Robeson was known for his civil rights activities, his anti-colonialism, and his positive view of the Soviet Union, a mob of self-styled patriots prevented this concert by attacking visitors and seriously injuring thirteen of them with stones and baseball bats, lynching Robeson in effigy, and burning a cross on a nearby hill. Afterwards, the Joint Veterans Council of Peekskill denied any involvement, the local police maintained that the riot had happened outside their jurisdiction, and the state police declared that no troopers had been requested. But union members and other left-wing locals did not give in and re-scheduled the concert for September 4. It took place on an abandoned golf course in Cortlandt Manor and was attended by 20,000 people, with security organized by the Communist Party and labor unions. Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Lee Hays, and other folk singers performed and then Robeson sang surrounded by bodyguards. But this time the protesters, many of them drunk, had positioned themselves along the road from the concert grounds and, shouting anti-black and anti-Jewish taunts, threw rocks at the cars and buses bringing the visitors home and dragged some of them from their vehicles and beat them up. Some visitors and union members, among them the writer Howard Fast, formed a non-violent line of resistance and sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” but with the police standing back, more than 140 people were injured and many vehicles were damaged. The two riots received na- tionwide coverage: churches, trade unions, and prominent individuals condemned the governor, the state, and the local police and called for an investigation, but the mainstream press and the local Peekskill officials argued that Robeson and “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 47 his fans had “provoked” the violence. With the riots remembered in numerous songs, videos, and films, the Peekskill authorities tried hard to get rid of their city’s unwanted fame as a haven of intolerance and bigotry, and as late as 1999 Westchester County held a “Remembrance and Reconciliation Ceremony, 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1949 Peekskill Riots,” at which Paul Robe- son, Jr., and Peter Seeger gave speeches. In 1989, Boyle told Jef Tombeur: “I grew up in one of the most liberal neigh- borhoods in America. […] I grew up amongst many Russian Jews who founded an anarchist colony which later became a Communist colony. One of the most liberal communities, certainly, in America […] and we felt very liberal about everything, radical almost.” For him, then, the memory of the riots must have been alive and embarrassing, and thus it is small wonder that he made not only the riots but also the world of the concert organizers central elements of World’s End. The novel’s protagonist, Walter Van Brunt, and his foster parents live in one of the “hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows” (212) in a colony that really exists—“Kitchawank Colony is a true place” (qtd. Tombeur). This is also the case with Walter’s friend’s cabin in the woods, about which Boyle said: “It would be nice to move to Tom Crane’s cabin, which exists, by the way, and which is in need of a tenant right now, and live a simpler life” (qtd. Adams, “An Interview” 55). And it is equally true with regard to the sailing boat Arcadia, which Tom Crane loves as “a miracle […] dedicated to all the great hippie ideals” (425) and which is a fictional variant of the folk singer Pete Seeger’s environmental sloopClearwater . World’s End consists of two parts, “Martyr’s Reach” and “World’s End,” whose titles refer to particular sections of the Hudson River and which contain nineteen and fifteen chapters respectively. The novel’s many-stranded action unfolds the multi-generational story of three families in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries and reveals both the changes and the continuities in long-term historical developments by moving back and forth between two widely different epochs. The “present” action, which deals with Walter Van Brunt’s search for his father and the accidents befalling him on his “hopeless quest” (395), takes place from 1968 to 1969 and fills twenty-four chapters (1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34). The “past” action, which deals with the adventures of Walter’s and his antagonist’s ancestors, unfolds between 1663 and 1694 and fills six chapters (2, 5, 15, 22, 25, and 31). 1949, the year of the Peekskill Riots, is approached from different perspectives in five chapters (3, 8, 14, 17, and 30), and chapter 6 covers certain events between 1929 and 1932. Although the action takes place in widely different time periods, all events happen in the same places in and around the town of Peterskill-on-the-Hudson, and all are somehow concerned with three groups of people: the high-born family of the Van Warts, who came as Dutch landlords to the New World and managed to become ever richer;1 the peasant stock family of the Van Brunts, who came as indentured ten-

1 Markus Schröder, pp. 26 f., maintains, without providing evidence: “Die Familie Van Wart […] ist der alteingesessenen New Yorker Familie Van Rensselaer nachgebildet, deren traditio- nelle Vornamen im Roman als Vornamen der Van Warts auftauchen. Auch biographische Par- allelen sind zu erkennen.” 48 Peter Freese ants and stayed poor; and the indigenous inhabitants of the region, the Kitcha- wanks, who were exploited by European settlers and, by the novel’s “present” in 1969, have been reduced to ‘the last of the Kitchawanks,’ with a tongue-in-cheek reference to James Fenimore Cooper’s proverbial Last of the Mohicans (1826). Boyle’s treatment of both the events in the revolutionary 1960s and the historical developments between 1663 and 1969 is knowledgeable and ironically dis- tanced. Since his narrator cannot possibly follow the “dance between Van Warts and Van Brunts” over the course of three centuries, he ends the seventeenth century period with a “final cataclysm” and then “pull[s] the blankets over Van Wart- wyck for a snooze that would last two and a half centuries” (383). But when, in the summer of 1969, Walter, the last of the Van Brunts, and Mardi, at this time the last of the Van Warts, find themselves in bed together in the latter’s house that was built in 1650 (281), the narrator sardonically says about this event which seems quite inconceivable in the light of previous developments: “Well, yes, here were a Van Wart and a Van Brunt fornicating in historic surroundings, but it had taken them centuries to arrive at so democratic a juncture” (287). At the novel’s end he even manages to heighten this situational irony into a climactic closure which ingeniously merges the different strands of the action into a totally unexpected constellation. With its complicated and many-stranded story, World’s End mixes facts and fictions that encompass about three-hundred years into a meta-fictional historiography that offers an extremely rich canvas of the “usable past” whose absence in America Henry James so emphatically deplored. Boyle explained his decision to combine Walter’s adventures in the late 1960s with the experiences of his ancestors in the seventeenth century as follows: You know, history fascinates me. To imagine Manhattan wired to the European inva- sion is one of the impetuses that drove me to write World’s End. Just to imagine it, in a pristine state, in a savage state, with the American Indians. Well, they lived in the Hud- son Valley for seven thousand years in harmony with the environment. I’m not trying, indeed, to romanticize, of course, I know they ate one another and they peeled the skin from one another and all that. But, you know, here we are, a species that is overpopulat- ing and decimating each other. We are five billion of us, we are too successful, we are going to destroy the whole planet. And we have certainly destroyed and polluted Man- hattan and the Hudson River and everything else in my time. (qtd. Tombeur) In order to do justice not only to the rebellious counter-culture in the Westchester County of the late 1960s—which he knew all too well from his personal experience as a drug-addicted punk and which provides Walter Van Brunt with sundry autobiographical traits—but also to the colonial world of seventeenth-century Nieuw Nederland, Boyle had to engage in detailed research about the Hudson Valley’s early history. Although he insisted on his right to take fictional liber- ties whenever necessary—“You want to get the details right, absolutely, but if the truth stands in the way of a better fiction, then I don’t mind fiddling with it a little” (qtd. Adams, “T. Coraghessan”)—he generally adopted the insights provided by relevant historical research and thus managed to fictionally recreate the clashes between rich seventeenth-century Dutch landlords and their poor tenant farmers, Yankees seeping in from the neighboring colonies, and Native Americans in the “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 49

Hudson Valley with striking authenticity. Thus, with the Kitchawanks he incor- porated a Native American nation of the loosely organized Wappingers Confed- eracy into his plot and had them—historically correct—live along the Kitchewan, now known as the Croton River, the Acquasinnick, now known as the Annsville Creek and forming part of the northern border of the City of Peekskill, and the shores of the Sackhoes, now called the Peekskill Bay. Their disastrous interaction with European settlers began when a Dutch trader named Jan Peeck, after whom Peekskill is named, began to trade with them, and most of them left the area after they had been hoodwinked into selling their land to Stephanus Van Cortlandt for European weapons and tools. Boyle integrated both events into his novel. Jan Peeck becomes Jan Pieterse with his “trading post at the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, on land that had lately been the tribal legacy of the Kitchawanks” (19), and Stephanus Van Cortlandt’s role is played by the greedy brothers Oloffe and Lub- bertus Van Wart, who cheat Sachoes out of his tribal land (see 273 ff.). As far as these and many other historical facts and figures are concerned, Boyle made use of such books as Irving Mark’s Agrarian Conflicts in Colonial New York, 1711– 1775 (1940), Dixon Ryan Fox’s Yankees and Yorkers (1940), Patricia U. Bonomi’s A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (1971), and Mi- chael Kammen’s Colonial New York—A History (1975). The latter, a well-known historian of the region, approvingly observed that World’s End “commands our credibility as a historical novel, in part, because the author so evidently immersed himself in selected aspects of Dutch and English colonial developments. There certainly are hundreds of ‘touches’ of authenticity involving language, geography, social and economic relations” (256 f.). Boyle confirmed that “the papers in the Peekskill Room at the Field Library or the texts Professor Kammen cites” (“His- tory” 260) provided major inspiration for his novel. It was not enough, however, to fill both time periods with believable life. In order to create a coherent story Boyle needed to gradually intertwine the two main strands of his tale into a single logically unfolding plot. He successfully started with that ambitious structuring process in the opening chapter, which is programmatically titled “A Collision with History” and begins with the intriguing sentence, “On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past” (3). In this chapter, the authorial narrator introduces a protagonist who is a motorbike-driving factory worker and would-be hippie and who faddishly considers himself “an alienated hero” (6) and a successor of Camus’ Mersault and Sartre’s Rocquentin. He gets stoned and drunk on his twenty-second birthday in 1968 and is haunted by the disappearance of his father during the historical “Peterskill riots of 1949” (3), a fact that made all his father’s acquaintances think of the latter as a hateful traitor, caused the death of Walter’s mother from grief, and led to the little boy’s adoption by Hesh and Lola Solovay. This information, together with the book’s dedication “in memory of my own lost father,” announces that the novel will deal with the traditional theme of a son’s quest for his lost father, and this is confirmed by Boyle’s admission to Elizabeth Adams that he could not build up a close relation to his alcoholic father and therefore “dedicate[d World’s End]— which involves a search for a father, not in an autobiographical sense, but in a 50 Peter Freese metaphorical sense—to him” (“An Interview” 53). Thus, on one of its many levels, the novel is yet another treatment of the complicated “relationships between fathers and sons,” which a year later Boyle would describe to Alexander Hilbert as one of his “authorial obsessions.” The accomplished opening chapter also plants other important seeds. It subtly extends the action into the far-away past by having Walter remember the tales that his grandmother told him when he was a ten-year-old child. These tales dealt with the indigenous Kitchawanks and told about how they were oppressed by the fierce Mohawks in the north and “flimflammed out of [their] land by the founders of Peterskill-on-the-Hudson back in the days of the Colony” (4). Together with the chapter heading’s reference to “history,” Walter’s constant awareness of these tales announces at the novel’s very beginning that its action will not be limited to the 1960s but will instead reach far back into the history of the original inhabitants and the early European settlers in the Hudson Valley. Out of the blue Walter experiences “a vague rippling vision of a leering Dutch- man in sugarloaf and pantaloons” (3), and on his dangerous nocturnal excursion to the old “ghost ships” anchored in the “imp-haunted” (11) Hudson, he has an imaginary encounter not only with his father but also with a whole group of out- landish figures including a dwarf “with a gargoyle’s face” (15) named Piet. It is quite obvious that these strange visions are connected to the legends and ghost stories that his deeply “superstitious” (7) grandmother told him when he was a child. And when one discovers that Walter’s ancestor Harmanus Van Brunt, who is known as “Ham Bones” (20) because of “his strength, agility, and gustatory prowess” (20), shares his family name with Abraham Van Brunt, who is known as Brom Bones in Washington Irving’s classic tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” one recognizes in the novel’s very first chapter that Boyle is indebted to Washing- ton Irving for creating the specific atmosphere of the Hudson Valley as a region unusually rich in myth and literature (see Adams, Hudson River). In one of his best-known tales, Irving, who spent his later years in Tarrytown only seventeen miles away from Peekskill and who is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, said that the Dutch inhabitants of the region “are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subjects to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighbourhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions” (273). Judith Richardson has shown that although ghost stories existed in the Hudson Valley before Irving, only his “literary renderings set in place a reputation for haunting, as well as a troop of ghosts that have been invoked and absorbed in the region to the point that questions of their authenticity have been largely rendered moot” (44). What gives Boyle’s novel its unmistakable atmosphere is the peculiar mixture of realistically rendered life in towns and villages that can even be located on a map with a world of the imagination that brims with bewitched places and haunted houses and is populated by ghosts, imps, and goblins. This latter, supernatural part of Boyle’s fictional world, which will bother Walter throughout the novel, is deeply indebted to Irving’s tales, which are evoked through some direct and many implied allusions. Boyle confirmed Irving’s crucial influence when he said in an interview: “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 51

Washington Irving is a principal inspiration for the book, […] Irving’s mock history of Dutch New York gave me many of the bastardized Dutch expressions used to comic effect in World’s End, and his touchstone story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” provided the types for two of the book’s principal lineages. On the one hand, we have the dreamy, sleepy Cranes; on the other, the muscular, physical, daredevil descendants of Brom ‘Bones’ Van Brunt. This is fun. This is great fun. We have my invented history relying upon conventional accounts, as well as the characters from another invented history. Wheels within wheels. (“History” 260)

That Irving’s tales are “a principal inspiration” for World’s End is verified by numerous details. Boyle’s Dominie Van Schaik (57, 136, 149, 170), who chris- tens Katrinchee’s half-breed child, shares his name with “Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson” (Sketch-Book I 56) in “Rip Van Winkle.” The members of a black family who work for the Van Warts and range from “Pompey II, now eighteen and the only male issue of the union between the late patroon’s domes- tic slaves, Ismailia and Pompey the First” (293) in the seventeenth century to another Ismailia, Depeyster Van Wart’s nurse (33), and Herbert Pompey, Wal- ter’s drinking buddy (10, 285), in the twentieth, bear the name of “poor old Pompey” (Bracebridge Hall II: 193) in “The Haunted House.” Boyle’s members of “the Connecticut Cranes, a family destined to furnish the Colonies with a limitless supply of itinerant pedants, potmakers and nostrum peddlers” (57), are descendants of Irving’s “legendary pedagogue-legislator” (67; see 119, 370) Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” whose mysterious encounter with a specter bears uncanny similarities with Walter’s adventures. When the eleven-year-old Walter experiences his father as a stranger “with a head like a pumpkin” (9), his comparison contains an implied reference to Irving’s headless horseman. When Boyle’s narrator observes that at a party Cadwallader Crane is “dilated like an anaconda with the patroon’s food” (415; see 413), he evokes Irving’s statement that the lank Ichabod Crane had “the dilating powers of an Anaconda” (Sketch-Book II 275), and it is no accident that later Tom Crane will wear a “scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda” (70). The novel contains passing references to “the legend of the headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow” (170), to “Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (219), to Pieter Stuyvesant (31, 55, 363), and to “Pieter Minuit and Wouter the Doubter” (171), and at one point the drunken Walter even finds himself “in the hind end of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow” (249), that is, in Irving’s home town. In fact, one might even argue that, like Rip Van Winkle, Walter becomes a kind of time traveler, only instead of awakening in the future he is accosted by ghosts from his family history and travels back into the past. The novel’s most important legendary figure is “the Dunderberg Imp, the ca- pricious gnome in trunk hose and sugarloaf hat who ruled the river through its most treacherous reaches, from Dunderberg to Storm King” (170) and who represents “the malicious forces of the supernatural as embodied in a leering little homunculus” (171). Walter knows him all too well from his grandmother’s stories, and later also the captain of the Arcadia refers to him—“Must be the Imp” (429)—when his boat gets into bad weather. In Irving’s “Dolph Heyliger,” an old gentleman explains 52 Peter Freese

that it was very currently believed by the settlers along the river, that these highlands were under the dominion of supernatural and mischievous beings, which seemed to have taken some pique against the Dutch colonists in the early times of the settlement. In con- sequence of this, they have ever taken particular delight in venting their spleen, and in- dulging their humours upon the Dutch skippers; bothering them with flaws, head-winds, counter-currents, and all kinds of impediments. (Bracebridge Hall II 256 f.) In Irving’s “The Storm-Ship,” the captains of the ships sailing on the Hudson report that they are often faced with thunderstorms on a particularly dangerous stretch of the Hudson, where it narrows and bends and is ruled by “a little bul- bous-bottomed Dutch goblin, in trunk-hose and sugar-loafed hat, with a speaking trumpet in his hand, which they say keeps about the Dunderberg” (Bracebridge Hall II 267). This threatening imp owns a storm-ship manned by witches and goblins that wreaks havoc on passing vessels, and he throws his hat on a ship he wants to attack, which will then blow away when the ship is in the clear. In Boyle’s conflation of the real and the magical, this legendary figure is somehow related to Piet Aukema, the gnomish companion of Walter’s father, who first appears not as a ‘real’ figure but as part of Walter’s drug-induced vision of a group of people on board the ghost ship on the Hudson as “a little man with a gargoyle’s face” (15) reaching “no higher than his father’s waist” (16). After his previous vision of “a leering Dutchman in sugarloaf and pantaloons” (3), Walter is surprised that the gnome does not wear “the sugarloaf hat or pantaloons” but is “dressed in working clothes,” but he nevertheless “recognize[s] him” (16). Only much later will readers learn that Walter’s father Truman really had a “buddy” named Piet whom Lola describes as a “short little guy, no higher than my chin” (84) and as a practical joker who “simply vanished” (93) together with Truman after the Peter- skill riots. When, in the ghost-filled night of Halloween, Walter goes sailing with Mardi in the Van Wart yacht and they anchor between the ghost ships, he has another disturbing vision. First, he sees an antiquated Dutch hat as worn in Rem- brandt’s paintings, that is, the very hat that the Dunderberg Imp is rumored to leave on the ship he attacks, and then he envisions “the little guy in baggy trousers and work boots his father had called Piet” (174), who now wears “the antiquated hat” (174) and razzes him. In another chapter, readers learn about Piet’s role in the riots as observed by Jeremy Mohonk, who secretly watches Truman with “his obscene little companion” (193), “a dwarf, his twisted little face blanched with evil,” whom he experiences as “the pukwidjinny come to life” (191), that is, in the lore of the Hudson Valley tribes, one of the ghost-like little men who materialize in the dusk when the sun drops behind the hills.2 Piet is also described as he is seen by Truman’s wife Christina, who waits for her husband and Hesh to pick her up and recognizes to her dismay that they are not alone, for “perched between them [in the car] like

2 Apart from Dutch superstitions as passed on by Washington Irving, and Native American folklore about pukwidjinnies and other animistic deities, Irving also refers in passing to “the loup-garou” (65), a creature from African-American folklore, and for “the wailing woman of the Blue Rock, who’d perished in a snowstorm and whose voice could still be heard on nights when the snow fell thick“ (65), he invents a kind of origin story in his chapter “The Wailing Woman” about Katrinchee’s madness and her death in the snow. “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 53 a ventriloquist’s dummy, his naked little hands braced against the dashboard and his face locked in a mad evil sneer of triumph, was Piet” (223 f.). When Truman disappears without an explanation, once again Piet suddenly appears in the car, “sprung up like a toadstool from the sunless depths of the interior” (226) and waving goodbye. Before his second accident, Walter is passed by a gang of mo- torcyclists. On one of the bikes he recognizes “the shrunken Dutchman, the imp, the sugarloaf hat clinging to his head in defiance of wind and logic both” (256), and on another his father, who gives him a shove and thus triggers the accident. So far, then, Piet appears either as seen by others or as hallucinated by Walter, but later he suddenly turns up, “shrunken, tiny, propped up in the enormous bed like a stuffed toy” (266), in Walter’s hospital room as “a leering little homunculus” (267). Introducing himself as Piet Aukema (268), the thoroughly disagreeable dwarf tells Walter that he knew his father and that Truman now teaches in Bar- row, Alaska, and then vanishes as suddenly as he appeared. When Walter visits his father and tells him that he learned about his whereabouts from Piet, Truman says that he has not seen him for twenty years and wonders how he could know his address. When Walter, in his final act of betrayal, loosens the lines of theArcadia , he has yet another vision of the gnome, imagining “movement, a scurry of pathetic little legs and deformed feet, dwarfish hands fussing over the aft line” (444). Piet, however, is not only a real person in the novel’s twentieth-century action and a fiendish dwarf in Walter’s hallucinatory world. His supernatural status is heightened by the fact that another avatar of him appears in the novel’s seventeenth-century action. There, in the summer of 1679, the confrontation between the patroon and Jeremias is calmly observed by “a stranger no taller in the saddle than a boy of eight, his wizened face set in a smirk, a musket clenched in his gnarled little fist” (335), who is later identified as a “dwarf” (336; see 369, 379, 384). When in the fall of 1693 the patroon sets out to catch Wouter Van Brunt, Cadwallader Crane, and Jeremy Mohonk, he is accompanied by a “bellicose dwarf” (420; see 421) who keeps a perpetual watch on the Van Brunt hut. Previ- ous critics have touched upon this curious ‘timelessness’ of Piet only in passing. Michael Kammen observed that “even Piet Aukema, an evil dwarf who conspires with the brutal forces of reaction in the mid-twentieth century, has a diminutive seventeenth-century prototype who is also a source of misery-making mischief” (248), and Ulrich Horstmann called World’s End a novel in which “über die Jahr- hunderte hinweg eine Art Klabautermann namens Piet Aukema auftaucht und wie Poes ‘imp of the perverse’ die unheilvollen Fäden zieht [through the centuries a kind of hobgoblin named Piet Aukema appears and, like Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” pulls the strings].” Only Mary Paniccia Carden incidentally related Piet to the Dunderberg Imp when she stated that the dwarf who accompanies Truman’s ghost on the ship “bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dunderberg Imp, the novel’s malevolent spirit of place” (102). It is obvious that the intriguing conflation of the ‘real’ twentieth-century Piet Aukema, his nameless seventeenth-century avatar, and the ghost frequently hallucinated by Walter makes all of them personifications of the legendary Dunder- berg Imp. It is equally obvious that his programmatic name, which is related to both the historical Pieter Stuyvesant and Pieter Minuet and the fictional Jan Pi- 54 Peter Freese eterse and, through him, the town of P(i)eterskill, makes him an influential agent in the history of Dutch colonization. This is confirmed when Depeyster Van Wart dresses up for Halloween as Pieter Stuyvesant and his costume—“in silk hose and knee breeches, in a square-skirted coat with stupendous brass buttons, in buckled shoes and sugarloaf hat” (363)—is identical with that of the Dunderberg Imp. Ju- dith Richardson is right when she reads this as proof that “it is the Van Warts who haunt and destroy the Van Brunts” (285 n. 3). But it is more important to recognize the carefully woven web of similarities between the “real” Piet Aukema and the supernatural Imp as an outstanding example of Boyle’s felicitous combination of realistic and magical elements, which is clearly reminiscent of the novels of Ga- briel García Márquez. Such an impression is confirmed by Boyle’s observation: “I think that García Márquez is the best writer alive” (Adams, “An Interview” 58). Another crucial strategy that Boyle employs to interrelate the really existing with a merely imagined world is concerned with the symbolic nature of food. In the first chapter, Walter awakes to “the smell of potato pancakes” (3), which re- minds him of his dead mother, and then eats “a liverwurst sandwich” (3), which makes him think of his deceased grandmother. When he later fails to appear for his birthday dinner, so lovingly prepared by his adoptive mother, it is expressly mentioned that he misses “chicken cordon bleu, asparagus vinaigrette, and glit- tering chocolate mousse” (6). From the very beginning, then, food plays an important and meaningful role, and Walter is aware that “the potato pancakes and liverwurst were ciphers to his sad-eyed mother and the big-armed, superstitious woman who’d tried to fill the gap she left” (15). Throughout the novel, the effective “mnemonic smell[s]” (400) of his mother’s pancakes (see 80, 81, 115, 117, 124, 130, 222, 397, and 400) and his grandmother’s liverwurst (see 4, 5, 15, 46, and 170) will carry Walter back into scenes of his childhood and youth and conjure up forgotten memories or such mysterious entities as “a ghost in the scent of a pancake” (130). In stark contrast to these prandial catalysts, memories of Walter’s father are usually triggered by “the smell of alcohol. It was the cipher to his father” (15). Boyle has repeatedly admitted that “Essen oder Hunger [sind] Teile meiner schriftstellerischen Obsession [eating and hunger are parts of my authorial obsession],” as he said to Alexander Hilbert. Thus, in Water Music an African princess suffers from adiposity and in The Tortilla Curtain a Thanksgiving turkey plays a crucial role (see Freese); in East Is East the ravenous Hiro Tanaka’s constant search for food brings him into ever new difficulties (see Freese); and in The Road to Wellville a fictionalized John Harvey Kellogg invents corn flakes. In most of Boyle’s novels, then, “emblems of man’s corporeal nature—a morbid fascination with the food that goes in one orifice and the fluids that come out the others—are a recurrent memento mori” (Friend). This is especially true of World’s End, and whereas the numerous passing references to particular dishes and the associations they trigger alert readers to the general importance of food (see 6, 8, 9, 21 ff., 36, 45, 52, 81, 82, 86, 105, 126, 199, 200, 212, 213, 226, 243, 248, 251, 266, 277, 289, 297, 301, 305, 309, 311, 324, 370, 380 f., 382, 410, 413 f., 427, 429, 430, and 438 f.), Walter’s memories of the stories that his grandmother told him about the fierce Mohawks’ “propensity for roasting and devouring those who failed to please them” (4) and “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 55 about the cannibalization of Sachoes’ daughter Minewa point to aberrant eating behaviors that range from anthropophagy to terraphagia and assume important symbolic functions. Walter’s grandmother’s tale about the cannibalization of Sachoes’ daughter Minewa by a member of the “people who eat people” (4) is part of the true history of the Hudson River tribes, and in southern New England Algonquian “Mo- hawk” really means “they eat living things.” Once more, then, what appears to be a writer’s scary invention turns out to transport a historically accurate fact. The gruesome tale becomes an integral part of the story proper when readers learn that Minewa’s half-eaten, legless corpse is found in the very place in which the violent Swede Wolf Nysen built his hut (27) and butchered his family (50) and in which the Van Brunts then erected their farmhouse. Three hundred years later, Depeyster, the last of the Van Varts, who still lives in the house that his ancestors “built from native fieldstone and oyster-shell mortar, all the way back in 1650” (281) in walking distance from the Van Brunt farmhouse, secretly eats “ancestral dirt, scooped with a garden digger from the cool weatherless caverns beneath the house” (33). His estranged daughter calls him a “dirt-eater” (49), and since he always needs “a tranquillizing pinch of cellar dust” (152) when he is under stress, he carries around an “envelope” (450) filled with it. In the course of time, then, the barbaric Native American anthropophages of the seventeenth century have been replaced by an allegedly civilized Dutch-American “terraphage” (33) of the twentieth century, who symbolically tries to retain his property by physically incorporating it. Cannibalism and earth-eating as different means of incorporating the world in different centuries form only one of the brackets that interlink the events of the two strands of the plot. Recurring throughout the novel and structurally more important for the interlinking of its two time levels is another variant of the eating motif, namely, the sudden attack of binge eating. This motif harks vaguely back to the “annual Pinkster eating contest” (22) in the Dutch home country, which was part of a spring festival celebrating Pentecost (= Dutch Pinksteren), and it extends the lurking gluttony of Irving’s Ichabod Crane into the pathological hy- perphagia of Boyle’s Van Brunts. In the summer of 1663, Harmanus Van Brunt suddenly develops “an appetite so keen it cut him like a sword” (21). He devours everything edible in the house and then begins to ravage the garden, empty the cellar, and threaten the livestock before he disappears into the wilderness. He is found unconscious together with the half-eaten carcass of “Van Wart’s prize boar” (25), brought home, and temporarily healed by old Wahwahtaysee’s exor- cism. But when Katrinchee accidentally drops a hot venison stew down his shirt, he runs away again and is found dead at the base of Van Wart Ridge. Thirty years later, in November 1692, Harmanus’ son Jeremias suddenly feels the “preternatu- ral pangs of hunger” (380) and devours everything he can get hold of. When the worried family ties him to his bed, the damage is already done, with the winter provisions exhausted and three of the animals gone. After a week, Jeremias’ bonds are loosened and he goes out, kills the remaining animals with a butcher’s knife, and is found dead with his teeth locked in the hide of a cow. More than three centuries later, in the winter of 1969, Walter Van Brunt is suddenly wracked 56 Peter Freese by hunger pains, realizing “that he was hungry. But not just hungry. Ravenous, starved, mad—killing mad—for the scent and texture and taste of food” (438), he tries to satisfy his hunger, and soon afterwards freezes to death out in the snow. In contrast to the three Van Brunts who overeat until they die, Walter’s mother Christina reacts to the unexplained desertion of her husband by not being “hungry” (228) any more; she stops eating and starves herself to death. Katrin- chee, driven into madness by feeling guilty for her father’s death, also stops eating and puzzlingly confesses, “’I feel so … so …’ (she meant to say ‘guilty,’ but that’s not how it came out) ‘… so hungry.’” (204). Wouter is so deeply hurt by his father’s betrayal that “for the longest while, he couldn’t eat” (379). Thus, in both centuries, members of the Van Brunt family are repeatedly gripped by in- satiable hunger or succumb to voluntary starvation, and both reactions can be understood as desperate protests against an unbearable world. Mary P. Carden goes further when she argues that Harmanus’ gargantuan hunger is “a kind of resistance to his unmanly position within the patroon’s new tribute system—he becomes the consumer rather than the consumed” (100). And Judith Richardson postulates “the idea of a devouring force recur[ring] throughout the novel” (284 n. 3). Both readings are rather speculative, but what seems obvious is that in extreme situations members of the Van Brunts are driven by their need to either incorporate or reject a threatening world and that here again Boyle exaggerates realistic reactions into magically charged behaviors. The rich and powerful Van Warts can incessantly enlarge their property, and with them only the last scion, Depeyster, who has no male heir, relapses into an eating disorder. But the poor and oppressed Van Brunts can only empty the pantry and devour the winter provisions and then pass away. For them, “Völlerei, das besessene Einstrudeln von Welt, ist anscheinend die einzige Gegenwehr, die der ungeheure Sog eines ganzen Kontinents bis zum heutigen Tag gestattet [gluttony, the obsessive seizure of the world, seems to be the only defense which the enormous pull of a whole continent allows to this day]” (Horstmann). Apart from the central motifs of eating fits and starving bouts, Boyle also uses less spectacular chains of iterative images to guide his readers through the constantly alternating time levels of his meandering plot. A specific example is the white oak (quercus alba), which marks one of the book’s major scenes of action, and since specimens of this magnificent tree have been documented to be over 450 years old, such a tree is one of the few living things that can span an action comprising three centuries. When in 1663 Harmanus Van Brunt and his family arrive in New Amsterdam, they are “settled on a five-morgen farm a mile or so beyond Jan Pieterse’s trading post at the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek” (19) in a simple cabin, which “Wolf Nysen, a Swede from Pavonia” (27), built “some six years” (26) earlier and which is known as Nysen’s Roost. This cabin, which several generations of Van Brunts will gradually enlarge into a real farmhouse, is not only twice haunted because in this very spot a Mohawk brave cannibalized Minewa (4 f.) and a Swedish immigrant butchered his family, but it is also marked by a “white oak that [stands] in the front yard” (31). Throughout the novel, Boyle uses this oak to remind his readers that despite the huge differences in time, a crucial place of action remains the same. When in 1663 the patroon’s henchmen come “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 57 to evict young Jeremias, they pass “the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household” (50), and when in 1929, almost three centuries later, Jeremy Mohonk squats on a piece of land belonging to the Van Warts, he erects his tar-paper shack at exactly the same place “beneath the venerable white oak” (61). In 1669, Meintje Van der Meulen rejects Katrinchee as a whore, her desperate brother moves back to his old home, and the worried neighbors find him near “the ruins of the cabin, the white oak in its full vigor” (109). By 1968, Tom Crane has moved into Jeremy Mohonk’s shack, and the marriage ceremony of Walter and Jessica takes place “beneath the ancient twisted white oak that loomed over Tom Crane’s cabin” (115). In 1947, Jeremy Mohonk is released from prison and builds himself a cabin in the woods “beneath the white oak, in the place that spoke to him, precisely where his first shack had stood so briefly twenty years before” (188), but soon afterwards his restlessness “[drives] him from his shack beneath the white oak” (196). In 1667, Jeremias buries his sister Katrinchee “beneath the white oak” (206), and three centuries later, in 1969, Walter stumbles down the path to Tom’s shack “in the little clearing beneath the big naked oak” (343) in search of Jessica. In 1692, Jeremias finds the frozen corpse of Wolf Nysen and buries him “beneath the white oak” (379). Two weeks later, Jeremias himself dies, and the neighbors inter him “beneath the white oak. Just as if he’d been a member of the family” (382). These recurring references to the ancient tree that outlives generations of war- ring humans help readers to realize that the cabin in which Jeremy Mohonk lives in the late 1920s and then again in the 1940s and the hut in which Tom Crane resides in the 1960s are in the exact place in which the Van Brunts began their American adventure in the 1660s. Moreover, these references help readers to realize that the white oak tree under which Walter and Jessica are married is the very tree under which Minewa was cannibalized, Wolf Nysen’s family was slaughtered, and Wolf Nysen, Katrinchee, and Jeremias Van Brunt are buried. Only when readers become aware of this spatial condensation of extensive timescales can the narrator’s observation that the lovesick Joanna Van Wart haunts that cabin like “the unappeased spirits that were said to brood over the place in never-ending torment” (358) unfold its deeper meaning. And only in this context can Depeyster Van Wart’s anticipation of “the satisfaction he’d have in leveling that tumbledown shack” (454) after finally having bought the land back from the Cranes announce the final obliteration of the Van Brunts, with not only Walter dead but the place where his family lived for generations to be finally effaced. It is proof of Boyle’s structural mastery that in the accomplished first chapter of World’s End he plants several important seeds. He introduces the theme of a desperate son’s search for his lost father, sarcastically discloses the pretentious ignorance of the youth culture of the 1960s, evokes a dense subtext of local myths and superstitions, establishes a closely knit pattern of references to Washington Irving’s tales about the Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley, points to the crucial motifs of eating and starving, and creates suspense as to how the story will go on. The opening chapter, however, also offers a first taste of Boyle’s exuberant, highly imaginative, often poetically dense and sometimes melodramatic prose style and of his ability to expose human weaknesses by means of satirical humor. 58 Peter Freese

The latter becomes obvious when the narrator talks about Walter Van Brunt as a member of the hippie culture. Boyle said to Jef Tombeur: “I was like a Walter Van Brunt, I was stupid, just a defiant, dope-shooting, heroin-shooting, you know, car-driving maniac, and I just thought that that was the way to be. You know, to be some sort of existential hero.” Thus, his depiction of the novel’s protagonist and the counter-culture of the late 1960s bears clearly autobiographical traits, and this colors the satirical perspective from which Boyle’s narrator debunks the pseudo- intellectual climate of Walter’s world, catches Walter’s and his hippie friends’ sup- posedly ‘cool’ way of speaking, and employs vivid images which show his sardonic attitude, as when he says that a historical marker “could have commemorated one of Lafayette’s bowel movements or the discovery of the onion” (17) or that someone “looked as if she’d just run back-to-back marathons” (18). He cuttingly reveals the superficiality of Walter’s worldview when he states: It was 1968. Sartre was front-page news, Saturday Review was asking “Can We Survive Nihilism?” and Life had photographed Jack Gelber adrift on an ice flow. Walter knew all about it. He was an alienated hero himself, he was a Meursault, a Rocquentin, a man of iron and tears facing the world in unhope and as riddled with the nausea as a Jarlsberg is with holes. (6) The comparison of Walter’s irresponsible worldview with a Norwegian cheese with large regular holes scathingly deflates the former’s pretentions. The narrator exposes them even more fully when he explains how Walter’s posturing as a lonely existentialist hero is made possible by his ludicrously inept academic education: Walter had graduated from the state university, where he’d studied the liberal arts (a patchy overview of world literature, a seminar on circumcision rites in the Trobriand Is- lands and courses in the history of agriculture, medieval lute-making and contemporary philosophy with emphasis on death obsession and existentialist thought, to mention a few of the highlights). (42) But still more revealing—and crucial for what World’s End has to say about the importance of history—is what the narrator explains on the occasion of Tom Crane’s trip to a concert at Vassar College, after all one of the elite Seven Sisters, in Poughkeepsie: He was unaware that Poughkeepsie was an Algonquin term meaning “safe harbor,”3 but then no one else in the crowd was aware of it either. In fact, there were few who had any grasp at all of the notion that history had preceded them. They knew, in an abstract way, about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, about Washington, Lincoln, Hitler and John F. Kennedy, about the Depression—could their parents ever let them forget it?—and they dimly recalled the construction of the local shopping center in some distant formative epoch of their lives. But it was all disconnected, trivial, the sort of knowledge useful in the sixth grade for multiple-choice tests or for scoring the odd answer on a TV quiz

3 According to the town’s homepage, “‘Poughkeepsie’ derives its name from a spring where Indians once gathered to weave lodges from the cattail reeds. These Native Americans called their meeting place ‘Uppuqui’ (oo-poo-kee) meaning ‘lodge-covered,’ plus ‘ipis’ meaning ‘little water,’ plus ‘ing’ meaning ‘place,’ all of which translated to ‘the reed-covered lodge by the little water place,’ or ‘Uppuqui-ipis-ing.’ This later evolved into ‘Apokeepsing,’ then into ‘Pough- keepsing’ and finally, ‘Poughkeepsie.’” “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 59

show. What was real, what mattered, was the present. And in the present, they and they alone were ascendant—they’d invented sex, hair, marijuana and the electric guitar, and civilization began and ended with them. (74) It is this lack of historical footing, or what Boyle himself called the “pastlessness” (“History” 259), of Walter and his cronies that will become the major reason for his failure. Due to his ignorance of the past, Walter has no firm ground to stand on; this fact is metaphorically expressed by his loss of first one and then also the other foot, which is accompanied by Boyle’s characteristic wordplay. In his imaginary confrontation with his lost father during his nocturnal excursion to the ghost ships, the drugged Walter looks at “his father’s left leg” and shockingly realizes that “the cuff was empty” (16), prophetically projecting upon his father what will soon happen to himself. Immediately afterwards, the dwarfish Piet admonishes him, “Now, don’t you go following in your father’s footsteps” (16), giving him advice that Walter will not be able to follow for two reasons. At this moment, he wrongly thinks that his father has lost a foot, which means that he will not be able to leave “footsteps” for his son, and soon afterwards—in a resumption of Jeremias’ loss of his right foot to a snapping turtle, which is not accidentally the totem animal of the Kitchawanks (see 196)—Walter himself will lose first one and then another foot, and thus it will be him who is unable to follow in his father’s footsteps because, already after the first accident, he has “but one foot on the ground now” (124). Piet’s sardonic command is later varied when, in a drug- induced reverie in the hospital, Walter dreams of his father admonishing him to “watch your step, Walter” (46) and when, during the decisive confrontation with his father, he muses, “Was that it? Following in his father‘s footsteps?” (407). That the sardonic wordplay with such proverbial notions as “to be on firm ground,” “to have one’s feet firmly on the ground,” or “to be back on one’s feet” is intentional was confirmed when Boyle said to Jef Tombeur that Walter is “a man who drifts and he’s not attached to the ground, so he’s not connected, and so he can suffer the fate that he suffers.” Whereas thus the pretenses and shortcomings of the novel’s ‘present’ actors are satirically exposed, the seventeenth-century ‘past’ is often described from a different and less aggressive perspective. Boyle himself confirmed such an impression when he said: “I think in some of my more mature works and stories and in World’s End, I found a happy medium between that sort of absurd sense of humor and also a desire to say real and true things about life in the world and very serious things” (qtd. Tombeur). Thus, the promises of the New World for the early settlers are vividly evoked as follows: The land was fat, and the Van Brunts tumbled into the expansive embrace of it like or- phans into a mother’s lap. If sugar was dear, honey was theirs for the taking. So too blue- berries, crab apples, chickory and dandelion greens. And game! It practically fell from the heavens. A blast from the blunderbuss brought down a rain of gobblers or scattered coneys like grain, deer peered in at the open windows, geese and canvasbacks tangled themselves in the wash as it hung out to dry. No sooner would Jeremias shove off onto the Hudson—or North River, as it was called then—than a sturgeon or rockfish would leap into the canoe. (20 f.) 60 Peter Freese

But since the colonists have brought along the class distinctions of the Old World and the indentured farmers are still at the mercy of their pitiless patroons, the exploitative feudal system applies also in the New World, and it does not change when, in 1664, the Dutch colony comes under British control and Nieuw Am- sterdam becomes New York, because the new rulers “preserved the status quo— i. e., the landlord on top and the yeoman on bottom” (56). Therefore, despite its natural riches, the colony is by no means a kind of Cockayne become reality, and the settlers must soon realize that “here they were in a barbaric new world that teemed with demons and imps, with strange creatures and half-naked savages, hemmed in by the trees” (25). The poor Van Brunts are not only utterly depen- dent on the rich Van Warts, but they must also fight for survival in new and often inhospitable surroundings. Despite their hardships, however, the tenants’ strenu- ous labor, their considerable agricultural skills, and their neighborly assistance make it possible that now and then they can assemble for a celebration, as on the occasion of Jeremias Van Brunt’s marriage with Neeltje Cats: Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride’s health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: ‘Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodi- gious bottom and a bombas that made use of a pig’s bladder for a sound box, someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. (243) And when they meet to pay their dues to the patroon, they convene at the manor house,

where long plank tables had been set up in the yard around a great deep pit of coals, into which a pair of spitted suckling pigs dripped their sweet combustible juices. Five huge covered pots—of olipotrigo, pea and prune soup flavored with ginger, minced ox tongue with green apples and other aromatic delicacies—crouched around the pigs as if standing watch. The tables were heaped with corn, cabbage, pumpkin and squash, and there were kegs of wine, beer and cider. […] by three in the afternoon, the entire community had gathered at the upper house to unload their wagons, fill their bellies with the patroon’s good port, smoke their long pipes and dance, flirt, gossip and drink till long after the sun faded in the west. (413 f.) Passages like these, with their historical accuracy, their knowledgeably described details, their great vitality, and their atmospheric density, evoke the happy side of the settlers’ lives and, with their references to abundant food, are once again reminiscent of Ichabod Crane’s fascination with eating in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” These loving evocations of daily life in the seventeenth-century, which remind readers of the Dutch genre paintings of those days, offer historiography from the bottom up through the eyes of the average man. Therefore, they are both full of empathy and free of sentimentality and manage to depict the life of the pioneers in a very convincing way. But with them Boyle also significantly rewrites the promise of the official American Dream notion that every immigrant can be the creator of his or her own destiny. He describes the hopeless predicament of “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 61 the Van Brunts and shows that, quite to the contrary, the settlement of America by white Europeans was frequently based on a rigid system of social and racial injustice. This is why Mary P. Carden could rightly state that “World’s End undoes the American history celebrated as unique, libratory, and egalitarian, the history credited with producing a new kind of subject—a self-made individual, creator of his own destiny. Boyle insists that this history isolates, traps, and destroys subjects of the nation” (195). Concerning the third group, the indigenous Kitchawanks, the narrator does not romanticize them as noble savages but frequently depicts them as backward primitives, whom the condescending European settlers consider “a bunch of naked, illiterate, drink-besotted and disease-ridden beggars who couldn’t add up their fingers and toes” (273). Thus, the “withered old squaw” and wife of chief Sachoes, “Wahwahtaysee the Firefly” (27), is described as “dried up like an ear of seed corn, stooped and palsied, her face a sinkhole,” looking “as if she’d been unearthed in a peat bog or hoisted down from a hook in the Catacombs” (26). Here Boyle may refer to and ‘correct’ yet another literary source, Henry Wad- sworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which also provides him with the name of the “Hiawatha Motel” (159, 354), where Jeremy Mohonk meets with Joanna Van Wart, and the nickname that the Sing Sing prison wardens give the last of the Kitchawanks (see 186). In Longfellow’s epic poem in trochaic tetrame- ters, the Ojibwe warrior Hiawatha is taught Wahwahtaysee’s lullaby by his grandmother Nokomis:

Saw the fire-fly, Wah-wah-taysee, Flitting through the dusk of evening, With the twinkle of its candle Lighting up the brakes and bushes, And he sang the song of children, Sang the song Nokomis taught him: Wah-wah-taysee, little fire-fly, Little, flitting, white-fire insect, Little, dancing, white-fire creature, Light me with your little candle, Ere upon my bed I lay me, Ere in sleep I close my eyelids! (II 134 f.)

Boyle’s narrator depicts with brutal directness the miserable state of an aged squaw, who ironically bears the name of a tender insect, but one hears an under- tone of compassion and empathy. For instance, he says that as a young woman, in the autumn of 1609, Wahwahtaysee and her tribe had been enchanted by the wondrous vision of Hendrik Hudson’s “Half Moon silently beat[ing] its way up against the current” (26). Meanwhile, their life of harmony with nature, which they had enjoyed for thousands of years, has been destroyed in less than half a century because by 1663 “she’d seen her husband hoodwinked by [the settlers], her daughter cannibalized, her youngest son besotted by drink and the third part of her tribe wiped out by smallpox, green sickness and various genital disorders attributed by the Walloons to the Dutch, the Dutch to the English and the English to the French” (27). By the twentieth century, only one of the Kitchawanks is still 62 Peter Freese alive, and his fate most drastically represents the inhuman way in which the New World’s indigenous inhabitants have been excluded from the American Dream. Jeremy Mohonk, the self-educated communist, is treated with glaring injustice when he gets twenty years in the maximum security prison of Sing Sing (ironically named after the Native American Nation “Sinck Sinck” from whom the land was purchased in 1685) for trespassing on Rombout Van Wart’s property, and he is made a perpetual outsider when he is penned up in the Jamestown reservation: “The Hiawatha Motel made him sick. But it wasn’t just the hotel, it was the whole godforsaken, fenced-in, roped-off disease of the reservation itself. […] It stank.” (355)—or, even worse, looked down upon as the unwilling beneficiary of condescending commiseration—“Save the Poor Ignorant Downtrodden Native Ameri- can!” (353). With all three groups—the Van Brunts, the Van Warts, and the Kitchawanks— the numerous cross-references between the adventures of their ancestors in the seventeenth and those of their descendants in the twentieth centuries suggest a specific understanding of the workings of history. And the eating orgies that re- occur in several generations of the Van Brunts seem to point to a specific behavioral inclination running in the family. But there is another chain of events that is even more significant, that knits together the two centuries more closely, and that really sets in motion Walter’s search for his father. These events vary the theme of betrayal and might have been provoked by an everyday experience of Boyle’s that Benjamin De Mott mentions. On a summer break from the Iowa Workshop in the early 1970s, Boyle visited a friend in upstate New York, and he recalled: “Each morning I would take a little dirt path and walk down to the Hudson River, which was maybe half a mile away. One day I noticed a historical marker there—I’d been by it a thousand times—and I stopped to read it. In fact, that was the trail that Benedict Arnold had taken to escape to the British.” This accidental confrontation with the archetypal American traitor, whose name is also briefly evoked in the novel (see 17), might have provided the seed from which grew Boyle’s interest in the issues of betrayal and in the interrelation between past and present. When he was asked whether World’s End was about “a quest for origins, a historical saga, a book about betrayal, a way to come to terms with some personal evolution in your lifestyle?” he said: I think it’s about all of those things. Definitely about all of those things. […] Yes, it’s about betrayal, certainly. But betrayal is an unexciting theme, a theme that goes from the beginning of literature to today, and will go on for ever, and it is a fact of human existence, but a small theme, you know. I think it is just part of a larger context. And I think the generational thing was very important for me there—the historical perspective of what New York might have been 500 years ago—the setting in three different periods. 1949 was a very important period because it was my parents’ time and it was the time of the Peekskill Riots of which we had always heard about because it was sort of a blot on us, you know, a sort of shameful thing that had happened in that area. And then 1969. I originally planned to bring up the book up to 1988. Which would have preceded its publication. Actually, by a year. But, then I realised that it was not what I wanted to do. I wanted Walter to never mature, never to go beyond a sort of physical destiny, an evolu- tionary destiny… (qtd. Tombeur) “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 63

Despite these qualifications, it is undeniable that both structurally and themati- cally the betrayal motif holds a central position in World’s End. In the summer of 1669, Jeremias Van Brunt, who has “just turned seventeen” (149) and survived a number of heavy blows of fate, is ordered to appear before the patroon for illegally squatting on his dead father’s place. Limping along on a self-made wooden peg and bearing an ugly scar which the shout’s sword has cut into his face as a “new grain of his metamorphosing self” (143), he is deeply humiliated by the “invincible superiority” (146) of the patroon’s contemptuous son. Overpowered by the might and arrogance of the rich Van Warts, he abruptly switches from defiant pride to abject submission and, feeling “humbled […] weak and insignificant [and] guilty” (145), leaves the manor as a “beaten” man, with “the utter contempt” shown by the patroon’s son being “a thing that would be with him for life” (148). Ten years later, “in the summer of 1679” (288), the son who had so humiliated Jeremias during their former meeting has succeeded his father and commands all his tenants to come and do road work for him. Jeremias is the only one who refuses this order, sending instead his eleven-year-old son Wouter and his nephew, the half-breed Jeremy Mohonk. The patroon arrests the two boys, terminates Jeremias’ lease, and puts Wouter in the stocks. The infuriated Jeremias comes to free his son, and when all the other tenants take his side, it seems that this time they have a chance of winning. But when Jeremias confronts the haughty landlord, he suddenly breaks down, goes “down on his knees and beg[s] the patroon’s forgiveness” (336). “Broken at long last” (336), he swears al- legiance, “den[ies] his manhood” (337), and “for the rest of his miserable life [will] be the mere husk of a man” (338) and an object of bitter contempt for his deeply disillusioned son. Fourteen years later, in November 1693, with Jeremias having died after his eating orgy, his son Wouter and his friends Cadwallader Crane and Jeremy Mo- honk rebel against the patroon, Jeremy knocks him down, and Wouter sets fire to his barn. They manage to escape and hide from the infuriated landlord’s henchmen. But then Wouter, “thinking of his father” (422), turns himself in, reveals his two accomplices’ hideout, and accuses them of having done what he did. They are hanged on his false testimony, and he is lashed, branded, and expelled. This event is celebrated on the historical marker (see 79 f.) against which Walter crashes in 1968, losing his left foot. During the Paul Robeson concert in 1949, Truman Van Brunt betrays his left-wing friends to the self-styled ‘patriots’ around Depeyster Van Wart and deserts his wife and son without an explanation, and in November 1969, Walter (whose name is the English version of Wouter) repeats his father’s betrayal by loosening the lines of the environmental vessel Arcadia, the fictionalized variant of Pete Seeger’s Clearwater, having it drift off and crash with the ghost ships and thus freeing Depeyster and his cronies from the unwanted intro- duction of ecological concerns into the Hudson Valley. In the three-hundred years from 1669 to 1969, then, every confrontation between the Van Warts as the haves and the Van Brunts as the have-nots has not only ended with the defeat of the latter, but with their abject submission and, worse, their craven betrayal of their own rightful cause. The centrality of this topic in the novel is enhanced by the fact that a similar betrayal happened among the 64 Peter Freese

Kitchawanks, whose chieftain Sachoes was hoodwinked out of his tribal land, not by the Dutch settlers, but by his jealous rival Wasamapah (see 275), another act of betrayal “by one of his own” (276). Treason, then, has punctuated the history of the Hudson Valley and seems to run in the Van Brunt family, and this is the very self-defeating insight at which Truman has arrived after decades of studying his family history when he tells his son that there is no use fighting their family disposition because “it’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” (424). Accord- ing to him, then, Walter is genetically predisposed to repeat the betrayals of his ancestors, and this fatalistic message raises the crucial question of whether Tru- man’s explanation is just a flimsy alibi for his own failure or whether the novel as a whole presents a deterministic understanding of history. Since previous critics have answered this question in speculative and contradictory ways, a close reading of those passages of the text that deal with the meaning and impact of history is essential. Throughout the novel, Boyle’s narrator takes great care to keep the theme of history’s crucial relevance for the present constantly alive. World’s End opens with Walter’s “collision with history” (3; 41) and tells about how he suffers “an attack of history” (6; see 436), feels “sick with history” (10), and confronts the “ghosts of the past” (3). But it also states that when Walter passes a historical marker on his bike he muses that “history really didn’t do much for him” (17) and that he has never bothered to read its inscription. Already here it becomes discernible that Walter urgently wants to learn about his father in particular, but is not at all interested in the past in general. When he crashes against the marker and loses his right foot, he makes, in the narrator’s punning phrase, “his mark on the cut- ting edge of history” (19), but does not yet learn anything, because he still shares the view of Mardi Van Wart, the hippie daughter of his right-wing employer, who furiously accuses her father that all he can think of is “history and money” (40). Thus, when Walter leaves the hospital after “his second dire miscue in the face of history” (312), that is, the loss of his second foot in yet another accident, his awareness has progressed a little and he thinks about “the dreams and visions, history and its pertinacity” (78) and now has Jessica drive him over to the marker so that he can belatedly read its inscription. But when he later looks for Depeyster Van Wart in order to ask him what he had to do with his father’s disappearance, the narrator comments, “If he’d been asleep all these years, unconscious of the impact of history and the myths that shaped him, he still wasn’t fully awake” (115). On his laborious walk to Tom Crane’s cabin, Walter is flooded with memories: “And now here it was again: more history” (127). He suddenly recognizes that all “he really wanted to talk about was his father […] wave the bloody rag of the past in his face and reclaim himself in the process” (130), and then he begins to understand “how susceptible he was at this moment to history, nostalgia and the patterns of the past” (133). When he goes sailing with Mardi, he sees Jeremy Mohonk’s boat Kitchawank and abruptly feels “the grip of history like a noose around his neck,” but still “he didn’t know why” (169). Walter’s friends, however, perceive his changed behavior and recognize that he has “grown increasingly strange, obsessed with road signs, history and the Robeson riots” (213). When Walter meets his father’s former friend Piet Aukema in the hospital, he is told “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 65 that when Truman first learned about the expropriation of the Kitchawanks he was behaving strangely, “as though we could turn history around or something” (270). When he learns from the dwarf that Truman is still alive and lives in Bar- row, Alaska, “the chill of history [is] descending yet again” (268). And when he becomes friends with Deypester, he is not only “learning the business” but also “learning history” (286). When his letters to his father remain unanswered and he must accept the fact that his estranged wife now lives with Tom Crane, Walter feels “unloved and doomed by the scourge of history” (314) and tries to avoid further “scrapes with history” (325). And when he finally meets his father in Barrow, he sees him as a man “impaled on the past, wounded beyond any hope of recovery,” and dazedly asks himself whether “history [had] come home to roost” (407). Nonetheless, he still dismisses Truman’s monumental book about the early history of the Van Warts and Van Brunts as “only words, only history” (409). These and many more references to the omnipresent power of ‘history’ punc- tuate the novel and emphasize that, in James Baldwin’s well-known phrase, “the past is all that makes the present coherent” (4). This awareness is intensified by the fact that Walter is not the only one who must learn the hard way about the impact of history on his life. His seventeenth-century namesake Wouter is also “borne down under the grudging weight of history and circumstance” (384), and his mother Christina is haunted by the hateful faces of the mob, who are “her ghosts, […] her attack of history” (224). Jeremy Mohonk, the last of the Kitcha- wanks, has to learn about “the history of his race” (180) from both a white reservation teacher and from “the old stories” his father told him “with the breath of history” (180). But it is especially Walter’s father, about whom Lola says that “history […] was his passion” (85), who is really obsessed with the past. He writes his thesis, Manorial Revolt: The Crane / Mohonk Conspiracy (220), for his “B. A. degree in American history” (85) from City College, New York, and when many years later Walter finally meets him in Barrow, he gives his son a thousand-page manuscript titled Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt (409) on which he has worked for “twenty years” (411). In the course of Walter’s “hopeless quest” (395), his family’s accumulated history with regard to both the eating orgies that ended in death and the short-lived rebellions that led to betrayal and self-hatred gradually assumes the character of genetic determinism, and this is clearly expressed by the terms the narrator chooses to convey the impact of the past. Thus, early on Walter explains his visions as triggered by “genetic memory” (6), and in the hospital he is tortured not only by a “feeling of helplessness” but also of “predestination” (46) and haunted by “the burden of heredity” (82). He thinks that his meeting with Depeyster Van Wart “had somehow been preordained” (115), and he believes that his betrayal of Jessica with Mardi was “inevitable. Preordained” (173). When Doctor Huys- terkark explains to him the workings of his prosthesis, he thinks of “the unfair- ness of it all, the relentless, crippling, terrifying assault of history and predestination” (263). In a similar vein, Jeremy Mohonk feels certain that his affair with Joanna, the wife of Depeyster Van Wart, the son of Rombout, the man who sent him to Sing Sing (187), “was destined to be” (355). And it is this very concept of 66 Peter Freese history as a deterministic power and a genetically transmitted “doom” (423) at which Walter’s father arrives after decades of pondering “a truth that resides in the blood, a shame that leaps over generations, an ignominy and infamy that lives on in spirit” (411). In this context, it is hardly an accident that he arrives at his fatalistic conclusion—“It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” (424; see 444)—in his self-imposed exile in Barrow, Alaska, the coldest town in America at “the end of the line” (387), and that later Walter will freeze to death in a snowdrift. Paul Gleason has rightly pointed out that these details underscore the message that “the decision to betray one’s friends and progressive ideals […] results in the emotional coldness of both Truman and Walter” (71). Such a reading is further confirmed by passing references to Jack London’s naturalistic stories,4 which offer a similarly deterministic world view, while it is another telling example of Boyle’s love for wordplay that Walter dies after his ultimate betrayal because in the thick snow his artificial feet “betrayed him” (445). The novel’s central question, then, is whether Walter has a chance to break his family’s long tradition of betrayals or is condemned to continue it. The repeated use of such notions as ‘predestination’ and ‘preordainment,’ which are both de- rived from Calvinistic theology and imply that everything that will happen has already been decided by God or fate and cannot be changed, clearly signals a deterministic understanding of history. And in this context Walter has no chance whatsoever to cast off the curse that burdens his family, but must instead follow the decrees of a higher force, which also means that ultimately he cannot be held responsible for what he does. Against such a background, it is a felicitous choice that Boyle makes Walter think of himself as a “true nihilist and existential hero” (13; see 165, 251, 262), thus adopting a philosophical position which is the exact opposite of determinism. If he were a true existentialist, that is, someone who is “hard, soulless and free” (391, 440) and only made “[…] stronger. Harder, and more dispassionate than ever” (285) by his misfortunes, Walter would be able to create himself, take responsibility for his own destiny and, in order to be authentic, act as himself and not as his genes or any other essence requires. As a man who repeatedly compares himself to Roquentin (see 6, [121]) from Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) or Mersault (see 8, 251, 265, 312, 440) from Albert Camus’ L’É t ra nger (1942), Walter would certainly have the freedom to decide on the course of his own life. But the narrator makes it very clear that Walter’s so-called existentialism is nothing but a fad that serves him mainly as an excuse for violating social norms and conven- tions. Walter is egocentric, immature, and appallingly devoid of empathy and, like the other irresponsible dropouts of his clique, he lives for the day and is a totally pastless person with no genuine interest in history. Of course, he might have cho- sen the progressive political position of his foster parents or the ecological ideal-

4 Attempting to make fire in his cabin during a cold night, Tom Crane is compared with “the desperate doomed chechaquo in the Jack London story” (210)—a reference to “To Build a Fire,” where the protagonist is “a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter.” (London 14)—Telling Jessica about his planned trip to Barrow, Walter says, “I’m no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold,” (346) but when he stumbles through the icy streets of Barrow, he “began to regret his Jack London jokes. This was serious business” (387). “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 67 ism of Tom Crane and Jessica, but despite such warnings as Piet’s “Now, don’t you go following in your father’s footsteps” (16), he opts for Truman’s traitorous path when he betrays his newly wed wife with Mardi and later even rapes her, when he changes sides and chooses Depeyster Van Wart as a kind of surrogate father, and when he sabotages Tom Crane’s environmental dreams by untying the Arcadia. Despite these many failures he still is given a last chance to step back before he sets out for his ultimate betrayal, with which he wants to gain Depeyster’s praise and revenge himself on Tom and Jessica: “He could have turned right and gone home to bed. But he didn’t” (440). In the few critical assessments of World’s End so far, the novel’s unequivo- cal presentation of a deterministic force of history is read in contradictory ways. Werner Reinhart, for example, maintains that Walter is free to decide what to do. Reading the novel as a picaresque tale with its genre-specific properties, he emphatically rejects Truman’s explanation of the Van Brunts’ tendency towards treason as being passed on “in the blood” (424) as a “gigantische historische Feh- linterpretation des Hobbyhistorikers Truman Van Brunt [a gigantic historical misinterpretation of the hobby historian Truman Van Brunt]” (298). Instead, he contends that “Walters Entwicklung erklärt sich also primär aus den Gesetzmä- ßigkeiten der pikaresken Figurenpsychologie und nicht durch die Existenz eines dubiosen Verräter-Gens [Walter’s development is primarily accounted for by the regularities of the psychology of picaresque characters and not by the existence of a dubious traitor gene]” (269). Miriam Hardin takes a mediating position when she argues that Boyle does not leave his readers with a simple message that one avoid repeating the patterns of history simply by learning about them and thereby knowing what to avoid. But he also does not convey unambiguously the idea that the cycles he notes will inevitably recur. The reader may conclude that Walter’s moment of decision—when he could simply have gone home—represents the choices we all have. Being well acquainted with history may be used as a means of avoiding the ill effects of the past, but to do so requires that one reject fatalism and retain the idea that one may choose new patterns. (27 f.) And Paul Gleason takes a position diametrically opposed to that of Reinhart when he maintains that “in pointing out the ‘genetic determinism’ of history, Boyle in World’s End appears to reach the extremely pessimistic conclusion that all revolutionary action against the hegemony of powerful people, such as the Van Warts, is ultimately futile” (64). A close reading of the text clearly confirms Gleason’s position, and the author’s own comments clinch the case. Boyle repeatedly stated that he is interested in the meaning of history, and with regard to his understanding of the impact of the past on the present in World’s End he observed:

The critics liked World’s End, but so many would say, but it’s so bleak to think in this deterministic way. I wish I had better news. […] I do not have a congenial view of the parameters of human life as we know it. In the absence of God, we have science or, more specifically, biology. And the very genetic determinism I posited in World’s End as a way of perhaps shaking off my inherited demons—and I’m talking a tendency toward drugs and alcohol here—is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome. (Adams, “T. Coraghessan”) 68 Peter Freese

He answered Elizabeth Adams’ question of whether he considered history to be “deterministic in some way” by stating: “I think it probably is. You can’t escape certain biological features, ethnic features. And I think that there is a—it’s not a predestination, it’s a hopelessness to human existence. There’s no reason for it that we’re aware of. And you’re a pawn to forces you’re not aware of. Accident, for instance, seems to control everything. No wonder people are superstitious” (Adams, “An Interview” 57). And he was even more outspoken when he reacted to Michael Kammen’s reading of the novel by explaining: In World’s End, I am exploring a kind of genetic determinism, wondering if what one receives from one’s parents isn’t merely physical but behavioral as well. Is there free will? Recent discoveries in mapping the human genome have gone a long way towards negat- ing the notion—we are the product of our genes in every possible way. Behavior—behavior beyond tendencies toward alcoholism or madness or bliss, for instance—can perhaps be passed down from generation to generation. That is, if your father was an apostate, if your father was a betrayer, a thief, a murderer, then so are you, at least in potentio. If this is the case, then what does a knowledge of history avail you? Nothing. You are doomed to repeat history whether you know history or not. (Boyle 260) The evidence, then, is obvious: Boyle himself expressly confirmed that World’s End explores “a kind of genetic determinism,” presents man’s fate as ‘predes- tined’ by forces beyond his control, offers a revisionist and bleak version of the settlement of the New World, and debunks the promise of the American Dream that everybody has a chance for unhampered self-realization. But throughout the book this extremely pessimistic view is counterbalanced by the wit inherent in the narrator’s satirical unmasking of human pretensions and social aberrations, by the artful intertwining of a logically unfolding sequence of realistic actions with a closely woven net of supernatural interferences, and by the narrator’s language, which is bursting with humorous comparisons, unexpected images, and extravagant metaphors. How well this mixture works is best illustrated by the ingenious way in which Boyle manages to bring together the separate strands of his complex action and to create a surprising closure. At the novel’s end, a death and a birth coincide— Walter Van Brunt freezes to death in a snowdrift, and Joanna Van Wart’s boy is born—and this coincidence creates a situation charged with deeper meanings. Despite his misgivings, Depeyster Van Wart, who for many years has desperately wanted a male heir, accepts his wife’s green-eyed baby as his son, although he correctly suspects that the child’s biological father is the Kitchawank Jeremy Mo- honk. And in an even more ironic twist he decides to give the child the name of his father, Rombout, the very man who was responsible for the baby’s father’s unfair imprisonment in Sing Sing. Since the contemporary Jeremy Mohonk is a descendant of a seventeenth-century Kitchawank of the same name, Sachoes’ son Jeremy Mohonk, and of Katrinchee Van Brunt, his illegal Dutch consort, the baby born at the novel’s end carries the genes of all three groups that have been war- ring with each other over the centuries: the indigenous Kitchawanks who were ruthlessly dispossessed, the poor Van Brunts who never managed to rise from the oppressed, and the noble Van Warts who steadily increased their riches. With Truman in voluntary exile in Alaska, Jeremy Mohonk an aging outcast, and Wal- “It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones” 69 ter dead, there is no future for both the Kitchawanks and the Van Brunts, whereas the Van Warts once more turn out to be the winners and will be able to prolong their dynasty with the help of the newborn baby. Thus, Theo D’Haen rightly reads the situation at the novel’s end as prolonging centuries of injustice when he comments that “truly a world is coming to an end here, but contrary to expectations it is not that of the reigning aristocracy, but rather that in which opposition to that aristocracy was still possible and meaningful. Regardless of its often comic wit, then, World’s End at heart is a bleakly pessimistic book” (397). In contrast to him, Miriam Hardin discovers some rays of hope when she observes that Jeremy breaks the pattern of history in two ways. Because his presence causes Walter’s self-destruction, Truman’s theory of Van Brunt generational guilt has no chance to be tested in any children of Walter. Secondly, because the child born to Joanna Van Wart and raised as Depeyster’s son Rombout is actually Jeremy’s biological offspring, the Van Wart land ultimately goes back to the last living descendent of the Kitchawank tribe. (27) It is true that with Rombout Van Wart II the last living descendent of the Kitcha- wanks might take over the Van Wart estate, but it is equally obvious that he will do so as a Van Wart, so that his having some Kitchawank blood will have no social consequences and is only a poor consolation for readers hoping for poetic justice. The same objection holds for what Judith Richardson has to say. She points out that “Walter Von Brunt dies without children, while Depeyster Van Wart, whose wife has just given birth, will fully overlook the fact that this long wished-for heir, to whom he will leave his property, is in fact the progeny of Jeremy Mohonk (and thus represents an Indian repossession of that much-disputed acreage)” (209). And when she adds that “actually, since Jeremy Mohonk is descended from Van Brunts as well as Kitchawanks, the birth promises both a race-based recovery and a class-based takeover of the Van Wart property” (286 n13), this is only a theoreti- cal point since realistically the new baby is a Van Wart, and neither a ‘race-based recovery’ nor a ‘class-based change’ of the Van Warts’ century-old dominance seems even vaguely probable. Consequently, Boyle’s accomplished metafiction- al historiography, with its witty and often cuttingly satirical language, allows no hope for a better future but, on the contrary, combines historical accuracy and flights of magical inventiveness into a masterfully structured plot that unfolds not only a bleakly pessimistic version of the New World’s past but also presents a con- vincingly argued rejection of the promise of the American Dream.

Works Cited

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