Enon: A Novel
*Starred Review* Harding, a writer preternaturally attuned to the spiraling of time and consciousness, continues the Crosby family story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning first novel, Tinkers (2009). Charlie was a solitary boy resistant to the confines of school, ecstatic in nature, and happy in the company of his clock-restorer grandfather, George Crosby. As a husband and father, Charlie loves to read, walk along the Enon River, study the long history of his Massachusetts village, and, best of all, share his passions with his receptive young daughter, Kate. Now all is lost in the shocking tragedy that propels this surreal, apocalyptic odyssey of grief. Writing with ferocious lyricism and macabre vision, Harding lures us deep into Charlie’s memory and dreams, pain and desolation. Over a full cycle of New England seasons, Charlie, afflicted with the self-imposed stigmata of a broken hand and adrift in opiate-induced altered states, descends into squalor, inept criminality, and the terrors of the underworld, enacting his own private dire rituals of mortification and sorrow. Harding’s mythic sensibility, soaring empathy for his devastated yet life-loving protagonist, comedic embrace of the absurd, and exquisite receptivity to the beauty and treachery of the living world make for one astonishingly daring, gripping, and darkly resplendent novel of all-out grief and crawling-from-the-ruins survival. --Donna Seaman