All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men
general fiction
general fiction
“To get there, you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.”
Got it? Feel the pulse beating? Want to know where you’re headed? Straight into “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren, one of the best novels of the 20th century. His devotion to the roads, the towns and the rivers where his characters lived and died is as fundamental to his portrait of the South as the capture and representation of light is to impressionists.
As life becomes more frenetic and staticky with electronic interruptions, quiet and calm become seductive. Whatever happened to the contemplation of a breeze shushing through leaves? The shape of a rose petal in your mind? The fall of a leaf? Perhaps the monks are right. Ship us all off once a year to cerebrate [cq] the perfection of a single drop of water as it forms on the bottom of a glacier in Wei-hi, Tibet. Short of that, you might just steer your attention toward this phenomenal book by Robert Penn Warren. ~ Loyd Little
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