Will I love Riders in the Chariot?

There was one night reading this, when the story affected my breathing, heart rate, and time left on this planet, for the worse, as I galloped through it even though I knew every paragraph could hold up to a few years worth of study, if I hadn’t been so impatient to learn more!

Very crudely, White seems to say that it doesn’t matter what people do, goodness matters and the imaginative and usually obtrusive ways in which he shows good is often quieter than evil, more basic and durable, but sometimes not as strong, seem to… show more.

This massive novel consists of several novellas in which some of the same characters appear.

Each major character is given a novella, and the characters interact among each other in different ways. But the great thing about this novel—which was the first of White’s books that I read (and then I read all the others!)—is that White has an unusual, a surprising, a somehow oblique angle, on human beings and their actions and feelings and fates, that is brought so vividly to life by his stylistic genius.

Some of his long sentences are almost like compositions that could stand alone.… show more.