[Victoria]

I don’t think Roy was a bad person. He did care about a number of people. But every card was stacked against him, and he just didn’t have any insight at all into what drove him. I didn’t see his drive as lust - I thought he was trying to fill a deep terrifying personal emptiness. And in his nightmares, he’s shown desperately trying to escape fate.

Malamud paints such a hopeless, treacherous, bleak world. The phrase about most people ‘living lives of quiet desperation’ kept playing in my head as I read it.

That said, I thought it was a very well written, powerful book. The language was so spare, yet the portraits were very well done. It did remind me a bit of The Grapes of Wrath. It was the author’s first book - I wonder if he was influenced by it at all.