1981, Simon and Schuster

Gray's most audacious and passionate work, "World Without End", is a novel about the deepest and most lasting bond of human life - friendship. It spans four decades, from the 1940's to the present, in the lives of two women and a man whose experiences reflect the conflicts, joys and pains of an entire generation. This ambitious exploration of friendship and passion also deals with the obsessions of art, the impulse to self-abnegation and sexual excess, the subtle eroticism of great loves that can crystallize in middle age. "World Without End" is an intense, lyrical, exuberant work - Francine du Plessix Gray's major accomplishment to date.

"In World Without End, Francine du Plessix Gray displays the one indispensable gift in a novelist - she generates slowly and authoritatively a mixed set of entirely credible human beings who shunt back and forth through credible time and are altered by the trip. Ample, generous and mature, the book is stocked with the goods a novel best provides. Among its provisions is a complicated and interesting plot. Mrs. Gray's manner, both of mind and language, is an intensely personal combination of the lush and the sinewy - unashamed of rhapsodies to female beauty or of Wagnerian erotic climaxes and equally ready to rap out a burst of Morse Code wisdom: ''Childhood is a prerogative of the rich,'' or ''Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.'' The language itself thus becomes a complex and visible participant in the story, capable of both an attractive tenderness and a salty irony toward the actors. There are unobtrusive side-orders of social criticism, esthetics, a virtual tourist's guide to contemporary Russia, and one of the most moving of all descriptions of the death of a domestic pet. The sizable reward for me, though, was the one I hope for in any prose fiction - the filling of long and peaceful hours with a rare consoling spectacle: three unquestionably live human beings of strong intelligence, swimming in time, with occasionally desperate, generally wasteful strokes and rhythm but with startling vigor, toward a worthy goal: adult love.
Reynolds Price, The New York Times

"...a mandarin garden of a book--a voluptuously atmospheric novel that blends the three life-histories in such rich and deliberate prose that we're more consistently aware of the novel's surface than of the lives themselves; only in one small scene-the dying of Edmund's ancient cat--is the experience here directly involving, immediately affecting. But if Gray views her characters from a distractingly high perch, she also displays intelligence and discretion and the need to invest fiction with human usefulness--so this is something like a modern-day Edith Wharton novel: of limited appeal and impact, but undeniably worthy."
Kirkus Reviews

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