It Will End with Us
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A meditation on memory and futility among the ruins of artistic ambition, family myth, and the fall of the South.
Savage’s latest novel dismantles the mythic greats of the past—an American South that never was, and a mother’s artistic pretensions that never should have been. In the story of Eve, Savage finds a voice that captures both the frustrations of our degraded world and the tender sympathy it evokes for all our sad efforts to leave something beautiful behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slim, impressionistic tale of a South Carolinian family in decline, Savage (The Way of the Dog) again displays his distinctive, and late-blooming, voice. (His first novel, Firmin, about a bookstore-dwelling rat, was published when he was in his 60s.) Here, a woman named Eve Taggart sits at her mother's old desk to record the "figments, mental images, and phantasms" of her past: her eccentric mother, who only wears lavender dresses and harbors unrealized literary dreams; the games played by her boisterous brothers around the deteriorating family home, ironically named Spring Hope; and her own coming-of-age in the "busy world that I have never been quite entirely a part of." Eve's narration, broken into a series of short, associative paragraphs, is uncertain, wry, and poignant as often as it is bizarre: "Birds cannot be considered neurotic. Any bad feelings they have they get rid of by flying, I imagine." The Southern, shabby genteel setting and strains of familial madness recall Faulkner, but Eve's "inventory of tiny things" more resembles the off-kilter, experimental style of Beckett. The novel's fragmentation and insistence on the fictitious quality of memory never lessen the emotional impact of this portrait of a mother and daughter, each compelled to write and each "ill equipped for life."
