"even inanimate objects held their breaths"-?? The pathetic fallacy lives! And not even a specific or interesting one. This is the prose that Handy Andy O loves so much?

Well, I think that's an easy dismissal to attempt but a difficult one to make stick...any sentence with more than three subordinate clauses in it may strike you as son-of-Faulkner but the two styles...Faulkner's and Wright's (judging by the 'offending' sentence)...couldn't be more different. The Cormack McCarthy comparison has more justice to it, but McCarthy is a bit more 'difficult', isn't he? And Faulkner can be a LOT more 'difficult'....for his denser (and arguably emblematic) sentences you need an ENIGMA machine to break the code ('The Bear', anyone?). You can't mention Faulkner without half-conjuring the shade of Gertrude Stein: both were trying to do with words what Cubism-era Picasso was doing with paintings, with often jarring results. Wright's sentence is smoothly lyrical and quite easy to get in one pass...there's no shattered syntax or confusingly stacked points of view to deal with. It's just a bit long. Just because it's not sub-Carver doesn't make it sub-Faulkner.

Sorry, but that sentence was warmed-over Faulkner. Bad warmed-over Faulkner to boot.

My only problem with this review is the throwaway parenthetical that "most antebellum abolitionists were what we might now call fundamentalist Christians." This simply isn't true, although an intense and long-lasting revisionist campaign by Christians has caused many Americans to believe it. In fact, although many abolitionists were Christians, the leaders and driving force behind the abolitionist movement were secular rationalists arguing for abolition based not on Christianity but on enlightenment-style rationalism. Many southernerners defended slavery on biblical grounds, and the preferred method of attacking abolitionists was to discredit them as "filthy atheists." Yes, there was also John Brown and his followers, but it is only in retrospect that the abolitionist crusade has been portrayed as primarily a Christian crusade. If you are interested in learning more about this, check out Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism."

Didn't Cormac McCarthy sort of go here & do this in Blood Meridian twenty years ago? Based on the fine sentence quoted in his review, which cops McCarthy's style down to the DNA, I'd say Wright owes McCarthy one literary career- if not an out-of-court settlement.

Why does O'Hehir miss or skip this most obvious reference point? (But still drops Toni Morrison???) Is it because some reviewers still won't let McCarthy into the great dancehall of American letters because he doesn't hang his hat from the outset upon some paint-by-numbers liberalist totem?

Finally, a review that actually makes me want to run out and buy the book...although, indeed, I wonder if O'Hehir's subjective Delillo demotion will slip through with no worse than my skeptical grunt for a backlash. Anyway: well done!

O'Hehir is a splendid writer and reviewer, and when he talks, I listen. The excerpt used in the review and O'Hehir's further explication of the "melody" imagery Wright uses is a pleasure to read and reflect upon - although I'm sure O'Hehir will take heat for relegating DeLillo and Pynchon to the second tier for the moment. I will look forward to reading the book and confirming yet again my own good taste, bolstered by Andrew O'Hehir's validation of my literary values (grin). Thanks.