The Straggler: Dads and Cads

death, but that does not mean he views that landscape as somehow less than real. To risk being reductive—and one is always reductive when dealing with a work of art—his story amounts to a giddy offensive against the materialist sensibility that has become second nature to most of us. This novel wrests readers from that desiccated worldview.

In a spiritually plush story one might expect spiritually plush prose, and the novel does not disappoint in this regard. Even the adulterous cad Earl Urquhart gets a splendid sendoff: “Wanting to reach a hand out for the axe there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor.” Heart attacks aren’t much fun, of course, but aesthetically speaking, that’s not a bad way to go. Watson’s gift for description, whether of things earthly or heavenly, is remarkable throughout. In Birdie’s later years, her skin is described as “soft and malleable as a plucked dove’s.” Finus goes to visit a witch who has a face “like an old burnt knot of lighter pine within which two milky pools of hardened sap regarded him calmly.” Even as commonplace a thing as birdsong is invested with delightful heft: “The birds had begun their singing and their calls, a tuning up of the world.”

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

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death, but that does not mean he views that landscape as somehow less than real. To risk being reductive—and one is always reductive when dealing with a work of art—his story amounts to a giddy offensive against the materialist sensibility that has become second nature to most of us. This novel wrests readers from that desiccated worldview.

In a spiritually plush story one might expect spiritually plush prose, and the novel does not disappoint in this regard. Even the adulterous cad Earl Urquhart gets a splendid sendoff: “Wanting to reach a hand out for the axe there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor.” Heart attacks aren’t much fun, of course, but aesthetically speaking, that’s not a bad way to go. Watson’s gift for description, whether of things earthly or heavenly, is remarkable throughout. In Birdie’s later years, her skin is described as “soft and malleable as a plucked dove’s.” Finus goes to visit a witch who has a face “like an old burnt knot of lighter pine within which two milky pools of hardened sap regarded him calmly.” Even as commonplace a thing as birdsong is invested with delightful heft: “The birds had begun their singing and their calls, a tuning up of the world.”