The Law of Enclosures

"This lyrical and boldly constructed novel contains a powerful 50-page childhood reminiscence by a narrator named Dale Peck wedged into a bifurcated portrait of a tortured marriage. In his first novel, the well-received Martin and John, Peck used incandescent prose and idiosyncratic narrative shifts to tell a story about family dysfunction and the scourge of AIDS; he goes many giant steps further here. The Dale Peck passages tell searingly of a violently displaced upbringing-abusive father, mother dead when he was only three; three successive stepmothers, each increasingly bizarre. This apparently autobiographical narrative is surrounded by two accounts of a marriage. Each concerns a couple called Henry and Beatrice, and each is set in the 1990s. But onedeals with the couple's early years in Long Island, while the other relates their retirement in the Finger Lakes region. The juxtaposition of these two narratives allows Peck to say much about love, boredom, desire and betrayal. This is writing not as entertainment or an attempt to capture experience, but as an effort to surmount experience, to overcome memory and the lack of it in order to be free. The book's fractured structure seems to be the only form true to the harrowing emotional landscape it encompasses. The "law" of the "enclosures" of the title suggests two interpretations: the breaking of the rules of family trust, and the flouting of the conventions that dictate the form of most novels. Not only an unblinking look at the dark chambers of the human heart, this is also, and above all, a brave artistic gamble-one that, ultimately, comes up spades"--

Dale Peck is the author of twelve books in a variety of genres, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have appeared in dozens of publications, and have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he has taught in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program since 1999.