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Paperback edition coming 2 July 2007 **The Inhabited World named to the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2006** New York Times Sunday Book Review “This is a terrific novel, and you can’t help thinking, from time to time, that in a better world David Long would be a famous writer. But, as the book makes pretty clear, there is no better world; just this one. And when the words are right, even this world is sweet enough. |
The Inhabited World . Evan Molloy — a son, husband, and stepfather — fatally shot himself but doesn’t know why. He is now stuck in a state of purgatory in the house in Washington State where he lived and died. Currently, a woman named Maureen Keniston lives there. She is in her late thirties and is trying to restart her life after breaking off a long affair with a married man. The novel moves back and forth between the story of Evan’s increasingly troubled life and Maureen’s efforts to emerge from her own purgatory. In watching Maureen’s struggles and ultimate triumph, Evan comes to see his own life and death in a completely new way. ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618543359 Reviews of The Inhabited World Long is a lovely craftsman, with alternating sharpness and gentleness to his style. His portraits of relationship breakups are snapshot clean, often devastating … When one reads The Inhabited World, an hour can pass unnoticed — a hallmark of wonderous writing. More impressive, though, is the novel’s empathy and forgiveness for all benighted lovers … The Inhabited World is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in that it concerns itself with the choices we make, how both pain and avoidance shape us. Evan yearns to feel alive, but life itself is too frightening. Death, then, is a second chance to blossom. His new existence is startling, lonely, a little weird, but for Evan it will have to do. Author of several novels, Long is best known for his story collection Blue Spruce and the novel The Falling Boy; his preferred fictional landscape is an interior one, a province where longing and memory often collide. Unfolding with slow, almost seamless precision, The Inhabited World takes a while to fall into — how likely is it, after all, to have a returning suicide as a point of view? — and yet the story is beautifully considered, with a crystalline calm at its center… What Long masterfully achieves is the precise interior focus of a man whose life is circling the drain, and he does this without either high drama or sentimentality. Long writes powerfully, with a poet’s precision for language.
“ Gripping...meticulous...The Inhabited World reads like the most intelligent mystery you’ll ever pick up.”. |
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