Customer Reviews

Sons of the Rapture

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Sons of the Rapture is a great book written with inventive turns of phrases in a fast-paced, rhythmic prosody that keeps the pages turning, all while running a veritable gambit of styles (seemingly drawing inspiration from writers as diverse as Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, and John Kennedy Toole) but aping none. The book starts as a kind of pastiche of often laugh-out-load anecdotes, some recounted from the past and some taking place as the narrative unfolds, careening in and out of the lives of its two main characters and introducing the reader to a motley cast of cohorts. The two protagonists are 1) Billy Jones, a heavy-drinking ne'r-do-well stumbling in and out of relationships and jobs while carousing Chicago with a group of eclectic hipsters, and 2) his father Johnny Jones, a heavy-drinking South Carolinian with enough inherited wealth to fund any and all larks he might crave, no matter how ridiculous. As the narrative develops however, recurring themes weave the novel into a coherent whole, and by the end of the book, the reader is left with much more than just a handful of entertaining stories. I'll leave the details of exegesis to you, but suffice it to say that the novel, remaining ensconced as it does in the existential moment (even when delving deep into memory), never degenerates into pedantry or a neatly-wrapped story of redemption. If the characters ever experience rapture, it's the real kind, an imperfect one that takes place in the here-and-now rather than some biblical future... aimless, gritty, maybe even beat-the-hell-up... but rapture all the same.