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Synopsis
"A moving Portrait of a family united and divided by a tragic loss, a subtle meditation on moral responsibility, and a slyly funny comedy of errors, CENTURY'S SON is a heartbreaking, ultimately exhilarating novel by one of America's finest writers."
New Yorker
Morgan, whose first name has fallen away "from disuse," was once a fearless labor organizer for his fellow sanitation workers; it was his uncompromising idealism that led Zhenya, his college-professor wife, to fall in love with him. But, ten years later, Morgan has abandoned his activism; he spends his days collecting garbage and contemplating his decline, which began when his son hanged himself, at the age of twelve. As if the Morgan marriage didn't have enough to deal with, Zhenya's father, the famous Russian writer Peter Ivanovich Kamenev, is coming to visit: part charlatan, part bully, part wise fool, Peter claims to be a hundred years old, and his fame rests on a possibly apocryphal incident in which he had the opportunity to kill Joseph Stalin. The first part of the novel suffers from nervous energy, with too many characters and too much plot, but Boswell settles down to furnish a moving portrait of a family both torn apart and united by grief.