Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. A brave and original novel.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

Against that, though, set writing that is far more often lucid and fine, beautifully drawn characters, and a remarkably clever narrative scheme. Oscar and Lucinda (582 pp.) is sometimes too slow, and its energetic whimsicality can be grating. His style then becomes more appropriate to the material also less facetious and digressive. He fares better when he begins to parody Trollope. But these were 18th-century writers who expressed the energy of a particular moment: the last gasp of Merrie Olde England, about to be submerged by piety, industrialism, and red plush draperies with ball fringe. His first targets are Fielding and Sterne. Here, the results are uneven, largely because Carey has made some errant choices. The whole book is also a literary parody. Lucinda, an Australian heiress, consults Joseph Paxton, architect of London's Crystal Palace, and then she and Oscar, a clergyman, set out to erect a glass church-in darkest New South Wales. Many great schemes were hatched to try to harmonize the two, and so it is here. Mostly, though, this is a leisurely and witty fable about the two great enthusiasms of the 19th century-religion and science. There are dozens of characters and at least five important storylines, two set in the Old World and three in the New. Yet theirs is only the central plot in an astonishingly complex literary performance that moves between England and Australia in the 1860's. Here, he provides a splendid array of cranks and monomaniacs-with two of them, the title characters, living out an odd and tender love story. As he demonstrated in Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985), Carey is partial to eccentrics.

Oscar and lucinda book