num_pages: 270
description: 'The Entrance to Porlock' is the story of a journey, a quest, on the part of Peter Ringkoping, an octogenarian who lives on a small New England mountain where he has converted an old horse barn into a second-hand book store. On his journey he is accompanied by his two middle-aged sons, Tommy, a compulsive comedian, and Nels, dean and disciplinarian at a boys' boarding school. With them is Tommy's nineteen-year-old son, Tip. Peter Ringkoping, who sees ghosts and has moved ghost-like himself through his own life, has reached the point where he wants to put his affairs in order. Over the years he has accumulated a sizable tract of land on Tinmouth Mountain, and he conceives the idea of deeding it over to Hans Strasser, a kind of holy man-magician who runs a community for [mentally challenged] adults. It is to this community that the Ringkopings make their erratic way, each of them trying to come to terms somehow with himself and with the others. Nels is haunted by the fear of death, Tommy by the inanity of his life, and Tip by his search for an identity. In his own vague, half-heartless way, old Peter both haunts and is haunted by them all. When they reach their destination, they are surprised there by Tommy's wife and her nearly blind mother-in-law, and it is the encounter of all these people with the distorted yet oddly compelling world of Hans Strasser and his charges that provides the resolution of this very moving novel....Perhaps more than anything else it is the tale of the overlapping of illusion and reality, and of the terrible price of being human.
language: English
title: The Entrance to Porlock
titlecomplete: The Entrance to Porlock
ratings_count: 19
publisher: Scribner