This Magnificent Desolation - Softcover

Thomas O'Malley is the author of the novel In the Province of Saints, selected as one of the best books of 2005 by Booklist and the New York Public Library. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and teaches at Dartmouth College. Raised in Ireland and England, O'Malley currently lives in the Boston area.

*Starred Review* Duncan Bright, age 10 in 1980, remembers being born in a catastrophic blizzard and God speaking to him at that moment . . . and nothing else. Reclaimed by his mother, Maggie, whom he presumed dead, from a loving but bleak Catholic orphanage, Duncan maintains an aura of purity and goodness. He settles into a dreary life with his mother hard by the battered wharves of the San Francisco Bay among the forgotten poor. This literary novel soars and at times flat-out wanders off into reveries about pain, waste, angels, death, the ethereal beauty of song, traumatized Vietnam veterans, and Duncan’s imagined fate of the Apollo 11 astronauts who never return to earth (the title refers to Buzz Aldrin’s description of the lunar surface). O’Malley writes shimmering, luminescent prose. But the novel feels episodic at times, and the litany of despair may tire some readers. Yet it is a deeply spiritual novel about dissipation and waste. Although Duncan remains an enigma, Maggie is a fully realized character, a great opera singer whose career is snuffed out when her vocal chords are shredded following her breakthrough brilliant performance. Regrets, resignation, and a spiraling alcoholism fill her days as an occasional saloon singer, as she nevertheless provides Duncan with a love of great purity, filled with uncertain adventure. --Jonathan Schwartz