Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1694393 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-01
• Released on: 1997-02-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This lyrical and boldly constructed novel contains a powerful 50-page childhood reminiscence by a narrator named Dale Peck wedged into a bifurcated portrait of a tortured marriage. In his first novel, the well-received Martin and John, Peck used incandescent prose and idiosyncratic narrative shifts to tell a story about family dysfunction and the scourge of AIDS; he goes many giant steps further here. The Dale Peck passages tell searingly of a violently displaced upbringing-abusive father, mother dead when he was only three; three successive stepmothers, each increasingly bizarre. This apparently autobiographical narrative is surrounded by two accounts of a marriage. Each concerns a couple called Henry and Beatrice, and each is set in the 1990s. But one deals with the couple's early years in Long Island, while the other relates their retirement in the Finger Lakes region. The juxtaposition of these two narratives allows Peck to say much about love, boredom, desire and betrayal. This is writing not as entertainment or an attempt to capture experience, but as an effort to surmount experience, to overcome memory and the lack of it in order to be free. Though the book's fractured structure may frustrate readers looking for a controlled exposition, it seems the only form true to the harrowing emotional landscape it encompasses. The "law" of the "enclosures" of the title suggests two interpretations: the breaking of the rules of family trust, and the flouting of the conventions that dictate the form of most novels. Not only an unblinking look at the dark chambers of the human heart, this is also, and above all, a brave artistic gamble-one that, ultimately, comes up spades. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
As he did so dramatically in his first novel, Martin and John, Peck once again challenges our perception of what a novel is. Disdaining a linear narrative, skipping back and forth in time and place, and offering us differing versions of events, Peck limns the vicissitudes of Beatrice and Henry's difficult and damaged 40-year relationship as the two meet, fall in love, marry, and grow old together. These stories, or variations on a theme, enclose a long autobiographical section about the horrendous childhood of a young man named Dale Peck, a childhood that included his mother's death, three abusive stepmothers, and a hard-drinking and violent father. Peck's talent is undeniable, and readers willing to take on an unconventional novel will find much to admire. It is filled with powerful writing, unforgettable sentences (for example, "That night Beatrice stumbled over death, but it was dark, and she was tired, and she believed she had stumbled across love." ), and perceptions on love and betrayal that are so painfully acute it is hard to believe Peck is only in his late twenties. Nancy Pearl

Ingram
The story of a forty-year marriage follows the turbulence and joys shared by Henry and Beatrice, who in the emotional fallout of their relationship discover that they still have mutual feelings of love for each other. Reprint. NYT.