“The Second Coming” might have soared had it been piloted by an editor willing to throw extra baggage overboard.
Editors don’t get much credit, but they were the literary heroes of the 20th century. Roughly speaking, that golden era — part reality, part myth — stretched from Maxwell Perkins at Scribner to Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove Atlantic. During this period, novels became the quintessential mark of American culture, and Perkins, who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and others, helped shape several contenders for the title of Great American Novel.
But now with “The Second Coming,” Hallberg has slowed his pace and shrunk his central cast, while allowing his deafening engines to keep gunning. The effect feels like taking an F-35 fighter jet to pick up some gum at Walgreens. What all his rumination doesn’t provide, however, is much insight into Jolie. Although we’re reading what’s meant to be her later-in-life memoir — interspersed with “too-long letters” from Ethan — young Jolie remains not only mute but inscrutable. She may be the love of her father’s life, but Ethan remains the love of this novel’s story, which fawns on the handsome ne’er-do-well with a level of devotion that Rabbit Angstrom could only have dreamed of.
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