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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