Briefly Noted

Enon, by Paul Harding (Random House). An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning début, “Tinkers,” this novel takes its title from the name of a tiny New England village, where Charlie Crosby, a housepainter, is ravaged by sorrow after losing his teen-aged daughter in a bike accident. Charlie is the last of the family line, and he spends his days devouring painkillers, having shattered his hand by punching a wall in his grief; his nights are devoted to walking the old paths and byways of the wooded town in a near-hallucinatory state, trying to account for his suffering. Harding’s subject is consciousness rooted in a contemporary moment but bound to a Puritan past. His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com