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An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel, described as "Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock" by Esquire, from the author of The Volunteer It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds. Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory, The End introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.
In interviews, Scibona has said that 10 years went into the writing of The End, and it shows--each sentence was worked over until it felt chiseled out of stone. The book's ambitious non-linear structure and the densely poetic texture of its language have clearly turned off other reviewers, but if you are at all a fan of the great Modernist writers (Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Djuna Barnes), you will find a feast here. I read this novel back in 2010 and it has stuck with me all this time. The main characters (we spend time in each of their points of view) are fully realized from the inside out, and six years later I still think of them, their complexities and failings and strengths. The strange structure of the book comes together so brilliantly in the final fifty pages or so, tantamount to a magic trick. I am overdue for a re-read of this novel. I can't imagine writing a better debut than this one.
