WHIPPLE'S CASTLE

by Thomas Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 27, 1968

If truth is proverbially stranger than fiction, fiction should not be alien to reality and it is just this honest, and honestly realistic sense of life as it must have been in Whipple's Castle, and the small town of Leah, New Hampshire in the '40's, which obtains. Thomas Williams wrote Town Burning almost ten years ago, a secondary novel and some good short stories in between, and this is an expansive, interesting, involving novel of people you might have known in any community during World War II. The Castle, with its grotesque grandeur, is to a degree dominated by its ""monster king""--Harvey Whipple, wheelchair-bound for many years and just as confined in his relationships with his wife and four children; the eldest, Wood, to a degree the central character here; Kate who is beautiful and seemingly immune; David, indeterminately in between; and Horace, the youngest, and most appealing, overly serious and overly imaginative and given to agonizing fears. Wood returns from the wars, having lost an eye and a leg, but he will be salvaged from his somber moods by Peggy, abandoned by the derelict family squatting on their property; David and to a degree Kate pursue a more equable course; Horace, determined to be the protector of the sluttish Susie of whom the whole town has taken advantage, eventually kills on her behalf. But as an aftermath to the ""week of funerals,"" there's a postscript assuring a happier continuity for the family in Whipple's Castle. . . . A firm, traditional, almost Dreiscrian novel of substance and stamina.

Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION