Liam's Going

This weekend Liam's going away to college, and his mother, Cathleen Hogan Williams, is taking him there, driving south along the Hudson River. For Liam, impatience to arrive at a new destination rubs against the anxiety of a future apart. For Cathleen, the trip has a second purpose: a long-suppressed love affair she had before conceiving him has resurfaced in a poem she is trying to write. Noah, her husband, endures the new separation a home...until an elderly Irish enchantress, a client of his law practice, leads him to recalculate what he himself may have left behind in his youth. For this couple, married and alone, Liam's going ripples outward across the surface of their marriage, the melange of their intertwining memories. Michael Joyce's new novel is an affecting song of the rites of passage --startlingly beautiful in its prose, even more so in its recognitions.

Review :
"Joyce's new print novel, following many acclaimed hypertext works, addresses with powerful lyricism two parents' psychological adjustments to their son's departure for college. Constructed much like a poem, the novel is composed of artfully juxtaposed lines of dialogue, details and descriptive phrases; its narrative jumps among present, past and beyond convince us that the present is only a thin netting tossed over the past. ? Joyce's language is often gorgeously musical, and the novel has numerous quiet pleasures to impart."--Publishers Weekly "Michael Joyce is best known as an innovator in hypertext fiction Before the advent of hypertext he'd written one novel; now after writing many hypertexts, including the early landmark Afternoon, a Story, and a pair of nonfiction books about hypertext, he returns to the non-hyper novel with Liam 'S Going. While this contemplative, poetic novel may not bear overt marks of Joyce's hypertextual experience, the emotional tone of Liam's Going is not that far from Afternoon's famous opening line: "I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning." There's a quieter loss at issue in the new work, a son's departure for college rather than a son's possible death, and the novel's characters are riddling over a more subdued mystery. Even so, Liam 's Going allows Joyce the space to ponder the passing or persistence of love and shared lives, storytelling as memory and connection, with a sense of poetry intermixed through it all. "Poetry" as one character muses, "is a car through darkening hills, where dusk comes early in recesses and hollows and where dawn illuminates distant peaks long before it settles back into these forgotten valleys." With slow and precise emotional detail, the novel alternates between the point of view of the wife, a poet, and the husband, a lawyer; as they move through the weekend of their son's departure. The narrative is more concerned with tracing the movement of thought than recording outward action, and what is and isn't hypertextual here is the way Joyce builds energy in a situation through sustained internal monologue, the way nuance unfolds as themes and ideas recur and resurface, remembered and re-remembered by the characters. Liam's Going showcases the alinear momentum of minds in a heightened moment, the gradual accumulation of small epiphanies."--Rain Taxi "This new novel isn't merely steeped in Hudson River Valley lore, it positively radiates with knowledge of and affection for the area. The action is set in what Manhattanites call 'upstate,' the author lives in New Hamburg and teaches in Poughkeepsie, and the publisher has offices in Kingston. Characters relate fascinating nuggets of local history, particularly from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days of Dutch trading on the river up to the Revolutionary War, like the tale of how traitor John Andre was betrayed by his shoes. In addition to being an eloquent meditation on memory and passion, the book is a sort of poets' guide to the area between Peeksill and Albany...."--ForeWord Magazine