JULIUS WINSOME in THE NEW YORKER

Open your new New Yorker to the book section today to see a great review of Julius Winsome! The perfect holiday gift!

Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan (Overlook; $23.95). The title character of this unsettling novel lives alone in the deep woods of Maine, home to men “who cannot live anywhere else.” Fifty-one and never married, Julius remains in the remote cabin where he grew up, with only the company of his dog, Hobbes, and thousands of books left him by his father. When Hobbes is shot at close range by a deer hunter, inchoate rage drives Julius out of his isolation to track down the killer. In past novels, Donovan has resorted to literary effects to make points about man’s capacity for violence; here he settles for the clean punch of language, which he delivers with devastating force. In prose laced with hard-edged Shakespeareanisms—“amort,” “blood-boltered,” “cullion”—he pursues the nature of human cruelty, the reason that “some men must create pain in others to feel less of it themselves.”