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The Young Americans
| Article
# : |
18129 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
2,049 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
THE WINGS OF THE MORNING
Thomas Tryon
New York: Knopf, 1990
568 pp., $22.95
According to the dust jacket, The Wings of the Morning is Thomas Tryon's "most ambitious novel to date, a leap beyond his more popular novels, which include Harvest Home, The Other and Crowned Heads. And indeed The Wings of the Morning is a novel with a promising and well-conceived focus. The first in a series of novels under the general title of Kingdom Come, it is intended to be a chronicle of the dynamic and expansive American republic, beginning in the early nineteenth century. Tryon has chosen to take the macrocosm of America and view it through the microcosm of Pequot Landing, a fictionalized port on the Connecticut coastline. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the novel's heroine is herself symbolic of the virtues of Pequot Landing and hence of the hope and promise of the nation. All of the myriad characters and incident of the story feed like tributaries into the novel's grand conception.
The clarity and sweep of the novel's formulation, however, stand in fairly sharp contrast to the execution of that design. Within a hundred pages, it becomes evident that Tryon is writing in the manner of a Barbara Cartland romance. In the course of a single day a young sea captain named Sinjin and a nymph named Aurora, who come from feuding families, fall in love and decide to elope to China. Sinjin is the adopted black sheep of the Grimes family, scarred from previous adventures, with a ring in his ear and a monkey on his shoulder. Not surprisingly, he idolizes the life and piety of Lord Byron,
... (1989 of 11725 Characters)
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