Fantasy Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction, Character Types - Fiction

White Apples

Name: White Apples
Author: Jonathan Carroll
ISBN: 9780765304018

by Jonathan Carroll

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Overview

Vincent Ettrich, a genial philanderer, discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like. Gradually, he discovers he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child—a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe.

But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side—if only Vincent can remember it. On a father’s love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.

By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.

Synopsis

Vincent Ettrich, a genial philanderer, discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like. Pushed and prodded by strange omens and stranger persons, he gradually learns that he was brought back by his one true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child-a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe.

But to be brought up right, he must be educated in part by his father. Specifically, he must be taught what Vincent learned on the other side-if only Vincent can remember it. On a father's love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.

By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.

Book Magazine

Though Carroll first won a following among fans of science fiction and fantasy, his speculative fables not only resist categorization, they defy paraphrase. His latest in a series of mind-bending plots rendered in matter-of-fact prose concerns Vincent Ettrich, a divorced father who has an affair, discovers that he is dead and returns from purgatory at the behest of his unborn son, who has the power to transform himself into a future-seeing dog. Then again, maybe Vincent isn't dead but merely dreaming, or perhaps he's in a coma. Whatever the context, linear logic means little in the imaginative world of Carroll, whose strange yet ineffably sweet parable uses Vincent's predicament to explore issues of free will, cosmic order and the essence of an orgasm. With last year's The Wooden Sea, Carroll received the most rapturous and widespread notices of his career, bumping his reputation from the genre fringes into the literary mainstream. White Apples deserves to make an even bigger splash.

About the Author, Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Carroll has written 13 novels, a short story collection, and a number of film scripts. He has won the World Fantasy award, British Fantasy award, French Fantasy award (twice), and the Bram Stoker award. He has lived in Vienna, Austria for three decades with his wife Beverly and immortal bullterrier, Jack the Idiot.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Although Jonathan Carroll's fiction is consistently death-haunted, it is rarely bleak or morbid, a paradox Carroll sustains in White Apples, which features a (literally) born-again protagonist caught in a bizarre, lethal dilemma. Vincent Ettrich, an advertising man with an uncontrolled passion for women, is informed that he has recently died but has been brought back to life to perform a single, crucial function. His lover, Isabelle, is pregnant with his unborn son, Anjo, who is destined to play a central role in a vast cosmic plan. For Anjo to play his part, he needs the support of both his parents. In particular Anjo needs the knowledge Vincent supposedly acquired through his death. Vincent, however, has no remaining memory of that knowledge, and no idea what to teach his son.

The resulting story is a deliberately chaotic construction that shuttles back and forth between past and present, dreams and reality, showing us a world that can change without warning into something strange, frightening, and new. White Apples is one of Carroll's most playful, eccentric, and entertaining fictions to date. With cheerful disregard for conventional modes of storytelling, Carroll has assembled a coherent narrative mosaic out of an inspired combination of the mysterious and the mundane. Just as he has for more than 20 years, Carroll remains the quirkiest, least predictable of American fantasists. In White Apples, he has produced a dizzying, instantly recognizable narrative that no one else could have written. Bill Sheehan

From the Publisher

“Reading Jonathan Carroll is like watching the X-Files or The Twilight Zone if the episodes were written by Dostoevski or Italo Calvino.” –Pat Conroy

“Jonathan Carroll is a master of sunlit surrealism.” —Jonathan Lethem

“Jonathan Carroll creates contemporary romances in the literary tradition of Hawthorne and other masters of the form. Fete him, read his books. See him for what he is—one of our most gifted and intelligent entertainers.” —The Washington Post

Don McLeese

Publishers Weekly

God is a tile mosaic, chaos is a fat man in a cheap blue suit and death is a learning experience for the deceased in this glib metaphysical fantasy from the author of The Wooden Sea. Vincent Ettrich, a likable rogue and womanizer, is shocked out of his daily routine one day by the memory that he died a short time before. With the help of a guardian angel, Vincent discovers that he has been summoned back to existence by the spirit of his unborn child with lover Isabelle Neukor. Vincent's death has inculcated him with information crucial to the harmonious ordering of life, and he spends most of the novel desperately trying to recall what he learned and avoiding avatars of chaos determined to stop him. The story is a classic Carroll romp in which personified states of mind achieve independent life, characters interact with quirky incarnations of aspects of themselves, and bizarre metaphors ("When you're dead they teach you how to make a water sandwich") are illuminatingly literalized. But Vincent's puzzlement over his quest and the iconic roles others play in it demands talky explanations that interrupt the spontaneous flow of fantasy and suggest the author has overreached in his stabs at inventive symbolism. The novel boasts its share of the fresh perspectives on life and love that Carroll's fans have come to expect, but readers may finish it feeling a bit like Vincent, more instructed than entertained. (Oct. 2) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Vincent Ettrich returns from the dead, brought back to life by his lover, Isabelle, who needs him to remember what he learned in death in order to teach it to their unborn child. As Ettrich struggles to recapture the lost memories of his past, he finds that he has both allies to help him in his endeavor and enemies to prevent him from remembering information vital to preserving the cosmic order of the world. Carroll (The Wooden Sea) infuses the modern world with a sense of the supernatural, using coincidence and surrealism as his tools. The author's simple yet powerful prose and his talent for creating characters that seem both unique and familiar make this novel a good selection for most fantasy and general fiction collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Expatriate Carroll returns to Dreamville and the joys of a 500-channel imagination that flips from anystation to anystation while brightening the experience into drops of blood on a beadstring. Wonderland in White Apples is Deathworld, a kind of Afterlife Airlines flight magazine of places to see on the aftermap, although Carroll's characters have zip religious backgrounds to guide them through the astral. Philandering American adman Vincent Ettrich, quite brilliant at his trade, either leaves his wife Kitty and kids to cleave to his great, sublime Viennese beauty Isabelle Neukor ("three-quarters perfection, one-quarter broken glass"), whom he later learns is pregnant with his child-or else Kitty divorces him for his womanizing. Then something horrible happens-which we'll get to. Isabelle takes offense at Vincent's reason for leaving Kitty and abandons him to his perfectly sterile new apartment for three months. During that period, Vincent falls for Cocoa Hallis, takes her to a restaurant where he and she are approached by Vincent's fellow adman Bruno Mann. Vincent goes outdoors to answer his cell phone, is told by Kitty that Bruno's wife has just called her to tell her that Bruno died. Thus the Bruno talking to Coco inside is . . . well, dead. Later, Vincent finds BRUNO MANN tattooed onto the back of Coco's neck. My God, Coco is dead too! though looking much alive. As it happens, Vincent himself died of cancer some weeks ago and is now being led about the astral by Coco, who explains to him that if he wants to return to life he must remember what happened to him when he died. Isabelle and her amazing polyphormous fetus bring back the pulseless Vincent, and together they recall rooms,restaurants and childhood memories and piece together and visit astral places, parents and grandparents. Meanwhile, hate-filled Bruno blocks their return to Realville. A variation on Carroll's From the Teeth of Angels (1994). Its strong charms grip without quite moving the reader. Author tour