the eldest son, loses a leg to a snapping turtle. Harmanus is stricken by an insatiable hunger, eats virtually all the family’s food, and throws himself off a ridge. His daughter, Katrinchee, runs away with Mohonk, the son of Sachoes. After his mother dies, the adolescent Jeremias is left responsible for fulfilling his family’s obligations to the patroon. Katrinchee gives birth to a son, later named Jeremy Mohonk, returns to live with her brother, and, in exact opposition to her father, starves herself to death. When Mohonk tries to take his son, Jeremias kills the Indian.

Meanwhile, a vengeful Kitchawank tricks Sachoes into giving all of his land to Van Wart. When Stephanus Van Wart succeeds his father, he is even more lustful for land, expanding his empire “until he owned every creek and ridge, every fern, every deer and turkey and toad and thistle between the flat gray Hudson and the Connecticut border.” The dictatorial Stephanus enjoys making life miserable for Jeremias, who now has a wife, six children, and a nephew to support. When Stephanus has Jeremias’ son Wouter and Jeremy Mohonk arrested because his tenant refuses to obey orders, the stubborn, rebellious Jeremias finally cracks and begs the patroon’s forgiveness. After finding Wolf Nysen’s corpse, Jeremias, like his father, becomes the victim of the hunger and eats himself to death.

Stephanus decides to kick Wouter, his brother-in-law Cadwallader Crane, and Jeremy Mohonk off their lands. After Wouter sets the patroon’s barn on fire, he blames his closest friends, and Crane and Mohonk are hanged.

In alternating chapters, Boyle traces the lives of these seventeenth century characters’ descendants in the twentieth century. Another Jeremy Mohonk, the last of the Kitchawanks, tries to reclaim the land of his birthright in 1929, strikes back when Rombout Van Wart assaults him, and serves seventeen years in Sing Sing. In 1949, Truman Van Brunt, like his ancestor, betrays his friends and relatives. He pretends to be a Communist sympathizer but arranges for thugs stirred up by Depeyster (Dipe) Van Wart, Rombout’s son, to attack a group of defenseless leftist picnickers. He then leaves his wife and son with no explanation, causing Christina, like Katrinchee, to lose her will to live.

Most of the twentieth century scenes revolve around Truman’s son, Walter, who has been reared by Communist friends of his mother. Walter is torn between the counterculture life of the late 1960’s led by friends such as Tom Crane, a distant relative of Cadwallader, and the wealth and position exemplified by Dipe Van Wart. In an incident reminiscent of Jeremias’ fate, Walter loses his right foot when his motorcycle collides with a historical marker about the supposed Crane-Mohonk revolt. He loses his wife, Jessica, to Tom Crane when she catches him in bed with Mardi, Dipe’s nymphomaniacal hippie daughter. He loses his other foot when he hits the marker yet again and is rejected by Mardi for becoming like her despised father.

Jeremy Mohonk gets revenge on his old antagonist by impregnating Joanna, Dipe’s wife. Walter learns that the father he has not seen in years is living in Barrow, Alaska, and goes there to discover that Truman blames his betrayal on factors neither he nor any Van Brunts can control. Truman has spent years researching and writing “Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt,” in which he links Wouter’s actions with those of 1949. Walter returns home confused, overcomes the hereditary hunger, and attempts to sabotage an environmental group’s ship, the Arcadia, on which Tom Crane is a crew member. Dipe is so thrilled at having an heir to carry on the Van Wart name that he ignores the infant’s obvious Indian feature and names it Rombout, after the enemy of the father it will never know.

World’s End—the title refers to the deepest hole in the Hudson River, where strong currents suck ships down—is a sprawling novel with more than one hundred characters. An exemplary storyteller, Boyle maintains control over his complicated, overlapping plots by centering them and his themes on a handful of vividly drawn characters.

Jeremias is notable for his determination to overcome the loss of a leg, the antagonism of the patroon, and all the adversities that afflict his family. He is initially the archetypal rebel, considering the patroon and his henchmen (one of whom is Jeremias’ father-in-law) criminals who must be defeated. This attitude makes his abrupt change of heart all the more inexplicable, dramatic, and unsettling. (In all of his fiction, Boyle attempts to upset the reader’s expectations.) Jeremias’ capitulation to Stephanus instantly changes him, in the eyes of Wouter, into “a man without definition or spirit, a man who floated through his days like a jellyfish at sea, waiting only for some survivor to snatch him up and consume him.”

Even before his father’s transformation, Wouter is a conformist despite himself. When he and Jeremy are being taken to be punished and his cousin escapes, Wouter locks himself in the stocks because it is the safest, most logical thing to do. He fails to see, however, that his father’s actions result from the same instinct for survival and becomes, emotionally, “as crippled in his way as his father before him.”

All the major twentieth century characters are burdened and haunted by history, doomed to repeating it. Jeremy Mohonk tries to choke Truman to death during the anti-Communist riot, becoming the snapping turtle who disfigured their shared ancestor as he bites off part of Truman’s ear. Because he and his Indian wife fail to have children, Jeremy is obsessed with being the last of the Kitchawanks. His need to have an Indian heir reflects his desire to control his destiny, yet he always fails. He wants to have sex with Joanna to punish the Van Warts but then falls in love with her. He finally throws her away for the sake of his revenge.

Though the target of much of the novel’s satire, Dipe Van Wart becomes the most sympathetic, if not exactly likable, character in World’s End. Dipe, who resembles the protagonists of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Thomas Berger’s Carlo Reinhart novels, is an eccentric who, whenever he feels tense or confused, eats “ancestral dirt, scooped with a garden digger from the cool weatherless caverns beneath the house.” Dipe needs to taste the dirt to feel alive, just as he needs to have an heir, to possess the fifty acres owned by the Crane family, to convert anyone who will listen to his right-wing view of the world. Despite his role in the 1949 riot, he is more comically pathetic than threatening, emblematic of those who choose not to live in the real world because they fear change more than anything, though they are powerless to stop it.

Walter is as self-deluding as Dipe, identifying with Meursault, the murder/protagonist of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946), convincing himself that he is an alienated, existential antihero. More accurately, Walter, with his plastic feet, compares himself with Melville’s Captain Ahab. As Ahab pursues the white whale, Walter is obsessed with his father, even imagining that his father’s spirit pushes him into the historical marker. Like Ahab, and like the protagonists of Boyle’s earlier novels, Walter seeks control but creates chaos. Boyle makes it quite clear that Walter would be incapable of recognizing the truth should he ever find it. His rape of Jessica, the only person who loves him, represents his ultimate betrayal.

The search for a father is a frequent theme in American fiction, but Boyle shows how pointless such an endeavor can be when the seeker allows his quest to blind him to all else, including his own identity. Such blindness cripples Walter as much as his accidents and the apparent curse on the Van Brunts. While characters like those in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) suffer for the sins of their fathers, Boyle ironically inverts this tradition by having his protagonists repeat their fathers’ sins. Truman writes in his study of the Crane-Mohonk revolt of “a truth that resides in the blood, a shame that leaps over generations, an ignominy and infamy that lives on in spirit.” Such a belief in fate suggests a denial of individuality, an evasion of responsibility. Truman resembles the characters in Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) in convincing himself that there is an explanation for inexplicable events. In other novels and short stories, Boyle explores primitivism in supposedly modern civilizations. World’s End asks whether the America of the 1960’s has progressed very far beyond that of the 1660’s.

World’s End, selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1987, is not a perfect novel. Here, as in Budding Prospects and several of his stories, Boyle devotes too much attention to the mundane rituals of the drug culture. In numerous ways, however, the novel displays his maturity as an artist. Boyle avoids such earlier weaknesses as too easy irony and too obvious satire. He is no longer clever simply for the sake of being clever. Most important is his command of the novel’s structure, as he shifts from century to century and from character to character to create a masterful interweaving of coincidences, parallels, and ironies.

In his satirical take on American history, Boyle's story oscillates between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. This approach allows readers to observe how specific events from America's past have repercussions three centuries later. Additionally, Boyle employs this dual timeline to imply that contemporary American society is as tumultuous as the American colonies were before the nation developed a clear identity. Another strategy Boyle employs is blending fiction with historical facts, a technique favored by many twentieth-century modernist writers. This method often indicates that the author is either rewriting history or expressing a wish for history to be rewritten. For instance, Boyle's characters include descendants of Ichabod Crane, a fictional figure created by Washington Irving. Alongside these reimagined fictional personas, real historical figures appear, such as Paul Robeson, the opera singer known for his Communist beliefs.

World's End explores the rights of Native Americans and the topic of agrarian reform. By splitting the narrative between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, Boyle illustrates how the oppression of Native Americans started with colonization, despite the fact that the issue only began gaining attention in the twentieth century. Boyle also tackles the question of property ownership and the wealth gap in the United States, as readers observe how the Van Wart family retains its estate across generations. Another related theme Boyle examines is the Communist movement and leftist politics spanning from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War.

The opening section of World's End features an epigraph from Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," a story that shares several similarities with Boyle's novel. Written during the formative years of the American republic, Irving mocked America's scant historical background by crafting myths about Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley. In World's End, as in all his novels, Boyle disrupts historical narratives; Irving's work offers Boyle a model for reimagining the history of Dutch settlers and their descendants in New York. The novel even includes characters named Crane, who are portrayed as descendants of Ichabod Crane, the main character from Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Boyle also references another of Irving's works, Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York, as an inspiration for World's End.

One chapter in World's End is titled "The Last of the Kitchawanks," a nod to James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans. Both Cooper's and Boyle's books explore the tensions between European settlers and Native Americans, but Boyle's satirical approach contrasts sharply with Cooper's Romantic style. Another chapter in World's End is named "O Pioneers!" after a novel by Willa Cather. Cather's work, which focuses on settlers in the American frontier, serves as a precedent for Boyle's exploration of colonization themes.

In his debut novel, Water Music (1981), Boyle utilized a dual narrative to illustrate the fragmented nature of civilization. In this book, Boyle shifted between Great Britain and Africa to depict the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Age. Similarly, in World's End, Boyle also employs a dual narrative, but this time he alternates between two different centuries instead of locations. As with his first novel, Boyle continues to blur the lines between fact and fiction in World's End. For instance, some characters are portrayed as descendants of Ichabod Crane, a fictional character created by another author, Washington Irving. Conversely, the characters in World's End include Paul Robeson, a real-life figure from the twentieth century. Paul Robeson's presence in World's End also introduces music into the story, and all of Boyle's novels incorporate music, at least in a minor way. The disruption of a Paul Robeson concert by anti-Communists represents a significant climax in World's End.