Sublime

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real.

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson. Two thousand miles to

Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter.

A serial line jumper has been making his way forward along the turkey line, a large white alpha male whose social skills, if any, are still in beta, intimidating people one by one out of his way.

Richard Powers

atavistic

Landsman fights an urge to lean on the electric fence. There’s a fool of a devil in him that wants to feel the thrum of current. There’s a current in him that wants to feel the devil in the wire.