Wolfe's novel about a bitter old man whose highly imaginative memoirs go beyond the real world and into another dimension is available for the first time in over a decade.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
On the face of it, it is almost impossible to classify Peace as a book of fantasy. So much of it is rooted so squarely, and so beautifully, in small-town mid-America, that it could simply be a book of Literature with a capital L. It might well be the ultimate book to hand to someone who dismisses all speculative fiction as a child of a lesser literary god. It is possible to have a science fiction book be lyrical, philosophical, intricate, possessed of both enough depth to drown in and enough wit to do so while smiling. Peace is such a book.
It is full of wonderful snatched flights of whimsy and of fancy -- the porcelain teapot adorned with the faces of its previous owners, and which, when filled up, will break; the transformation of an every day neat and tidy store into an Antique Bookshop, with gold leaf lettering on the door which instantly "goes from bright newness to an antique patina that might have graced the Great Chalice of Antioch"; the aboriginal people who, ten thousand years ago, crossed the Bering Straits into what would become America and "...eventually settled at Indianola, Indianapolis, Indian Lake, and various other places at which point they were forced to become Indians in order to justify the place names."
This is a writer's book, in a way. It is brimming with the kind of language which will find an echo in anyone who's ever written a word, as well as with insights into how the writer thinks, how he is born, how he is made, how he changes the world.
The protagonist of Peace, (while not himself a writer) is a creature of brooding creativity of which he himself may be almost unaware but which enables him to give the book its fantastical edge. It allows him to live in a house which is infinitely larger inside than out, and whose many rooms reflect not so much the genius of an architect but rather the living memories inside his own mind. He moves freely between the future and the past, talking as an adult to people long dead whom he knew as a boy -- even asking advice from an old doctor as to what he should do when he gets his stroke many years in the future.
The reader is never quite sure who this man is, or where precisely he came from, or what exactly he is trying to do -- but there is a little of all of us in him, and one way or another he takes up every reader and carries them all through into his timeless realm with him.
