Customer Reviews

Flood

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This is the third Robert Penn Warren book that I've read. The first was All The King's Men, followed by At Heaven's Gate. If I were to rank them, ATKM would be first followed by Flood then AHG.

If you're familiar with Robert Penn Warren's writing you will know that it is rich in poetry and deep in meaning. His characters have profound ideas and there is a large scope of understanding within which they express themselves. In this book more than in his other two that I've read, RPW's storyline is driven by his characters and their interactions and less from a sense of action and plot. While I don't clamor for a detective-style fueled-up page ripper, I think giving the story a bit more of an internal engine would have eased the demands on this novel's sometimes fatiguing characters.

The main idea and plot begin with a town that is being flooded to make room for a dam. After reading over breakfast a newspaper article about these plans, a famous filmmaker comes to the little town of Fiddlersburg to make a film. He is joined by one of Fiddlersburg's more famous progeny, and the local reunites with his roots.

The book brings us to understand that this little town breeds a dispossessed clan who cannot make connections with the outside world but are never free from the self-consciousness of their own insularity.

Flood could be one of the best books of our time. I say that it *could* because I found the book to be flawed in some respects. At times it was too opaque and idle in its dreamy meditation of the characters' experience and circumstance. Yet I got to know the importance of Place from which people come and continue to grow, and I felt a tangible loss as this connection was lifted away and the waters rose and the people began to lament. I think this is a great comment on modernity.

RPW has written another long and very good book.

I hesitate to call this work a novel. In fact, Robert Penn Warren hesitates to call it a novel. He christens it a Romance, correctly I think. It is far more apt a term. The book for which poet RPW is most famous is, of course, All The King's Men, which is indeed a tour de force of at least three novels woven seamlessly into one. His most powerful work, though, I still think to be World Enough And Time: An almost inhuman book of fulgurous brilliance lighting a desolate nightscape of the human soul. But this book as I - and Warren - say, is a Romance.

More - it is a particular type of Romance - the Elegy. It is sad and sweet with deep, long chords drawn out over hundreds of pages for the dying town of Fiddlersburg, the central character of Brad Tolliver and a host of other characters, living and dead, connected by what one of them calls a "mystic osmosis."

As for the writing, this same character, Blanding Cottshill, says, a propos thereof at one point in this elegy: "And without irony - I mean an awareness of that doubleness of life that lies far below flowers of rhetoric or pirouettes of mind - no real conversation, conversation of inner resonance, is possible." The writing here is full of the awareness of this human ambiguity and doubleness.

It is also, however, replete with flowers of rhetoric and pirouettes of mind, as befits an elegy. It's a lovely, lush prose poem for all humanity. And, as with all RPW's works, leads the reader into a mindset of deep contemplation.

To say that it falls short of RPW's best work - as it does - is not to disparage it by any means.