Three New Yorkers are on the road
to exile, fleeing despair in hopes of finding salvation in southern France--a
story of two friends locked inside a significant moral dilemma: accepting
murder as judgment against a man’s life of psychological and violent crime. Told in flashback and in the present, the
story takes the reader through events and adventures on the streets of New York
City and through the countryside and dark history of Vaucluse.
Owen Sarjevo, a lapsed Catholic of
Italian-American descent, is an enthusiast of literature, and obsessed with the
American Civil War. He is torn between a
life of well-thought-out philosophies and an act which would instantly violate
everything he believes. Attached to his
family and lower-middle class social station, he is plagued by the past,
especially his father, who died an alcoholic, and who remains the vacant symbol
of the family’s strength. Owen’s mind and
the events that bring him to plan an ultimate act of fratricide unravel as the
story progresses. We eventually come to the source of Owen's headlong rush into
perdition and his possible salvation among the eccentric characters and
conditions he encounters.
Other characters are Sarah, Owen’s
girlfriend; Walter, his best friend; Thomas, a naval officer; and Sylvester, a
bigger-than-life restaurateur. In France
the story assays characters with just as wide a personality as those in
America: a peculiar Catholic priest, a dying French novelist, and an
unscrupulous German businessman. It is
among this panorama of characters and the rich background of rural France that
Owen tries to find redemption from his violent and corrupted past. The justification of the end by the means is
rejected, and in its place, the achievement of hope survives.
With a tip of one's cap to novelists like
Robertson Davies and John Cowper Powys, this is a novel of complex
relationships, unexpected ironies, and uncertain metaphysics.
