Doomed to riches

Sunday 5 August 2012

Two chaps meet on a bench at Princeton University some time in the Gilded Age, that part of the 19th century when everything in America seemed on the up, if you had money.

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A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston Jonathan Cape, £17.99 Reviewed byTodd McEwen

Landish Druken is a Newfoundlander, sent to university by his sealing-captain father. Padgett Vanderluyden is heir to America's biggest fortune. He decides on the spot the rough-hewn Landish must, and will, be his only friend, for life.

"Van" begs Landish to come with him to North Carolina, where he is going to build the world's largest house and Landish can be the novelist he wants to be. Landish instead goes home, imbued with higher tastes than his father can stomach. Soon he is destitute in an attic, writing the beginning of a novel over and over, burning it every night.Landish and Van are japesters in the antique undergraduate style – when Van's father dies, Landish makes him smile at a haberdashery, singing: "Full fathom five thy father lies/Those are pants that were his size." But Landish's desire to use his talent condemns him to his attic.This, however, is the setting of the greatest achievement of A World Elsewhere: a poetic and very deft observation of the nature of the bonds between parent and child. Most important is Landish's relationship with Deacon, the orphan he "buys" out of guilt. He raises Deacon in a punning yet meaningful dialogue that informs the boy about the world in a rich, ironic way. It is to these charms put on life that the little boy clings in their eventual adventure at "Vanderland", the demesne and doom Van has created for himself in the middle of nowhere. The novel's tone shifts as writer and boy are sucked into the etiolated atmosphere of Vanderland. The violently painted language of the first part is abandoned: the storms are now inside people. Vanderland is becoming a mausoleum, and Van knows it. Landish and Deacon tread life in, like dirty footprints. This is going to end badly, for Van, like a Hearst, really wants to be alone.The denouement is a surprising eruption into derring-do and Pinkertons. The direction taken by the characters, as drawn by Johnston in the novel, would probably in reality have been different. But after sweeping us from the wild world of St John's Bay to the interior of the costliest sarcophagus in the world, you can't blame him. After all, the Police Gazette was always read by more people than the Social Register.

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Doomed to riches

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