Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Heinrich Gladney’s hairline is beginning to recede, and his father wonders if he is somehow to blame. Perhaps Gladney’s wife ingested something hazardous when she was pregnant, or maybe Gladney unknowingly raised him too close to some kind of nuclear or chemical dump site. (The word around town is that the sunsets here are much more intense than they were thirty or forty years ago.) This is a world in which man’s guilt is now compounded by technology, “the daily seeping falsehearted death.”
Fourteen-year-old Heinrich is a moody and evasive boy who is sometimes terrifyingly obedient. Gladney suspects that his son only accedes to his parents’ wishes as part of a silent reproach against them. Babette fears that...
(The entire section is 503 words.)
