Product Description

John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15742 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Released on: 2006-10-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

About the Author

John Crowley is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. His critically acclaimed works include DÆmonomania, Love & Sleep, Ægypt, The Translator, and, most recently, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.

Customer Reviews

Poetic diversion
To be fair, this book is not for everyone. In rapt affection, i read passages to my friend, and he balked at the superfluous language. He is a man who enjoys concise, dense language full of references that would make Pound proud. He doesn't read poetry, or like language for the sake of language. I am a reader who enjoys the slipstream of language that one typically finds in poetry: taking many words, allegories, symbols to describe an emotion more so than a place or event. If your reading style is like that of my friend, you will not like this book.

That is what happens in this book. It uses Faerie as a vehicle for the reverence of nature and the mysteries of changing seasons and individual relationships to those seasons: the way Drinkwater was fearful as each Winter encroached upon his safe Spring/Summer and Smokey Barnable appreciated the facets of each season to its fullest. (incidentally, i believe that might be one reason why Smoky, who despite also being an outsider, was so much closer to Faerie, while John Drinkwater had to struggle with his discoveries (much like Auberon later does). Smokey understood that there was a certain amount of flexibility in thought necessary, and appreciation of the mysteries which John couldn't let go and dealt with by creating the house that later became an access point to those mysteries.).

The relationships between people are equally poetic and it is a joy to discover who will end up "holding court" so to speak, over our new understanding of Faerie. We learn about Oberon and Titania and their start in the world. The trip between what we remember as fantasy and this seemingly "real" world that is just slightly beyond our view (and even their own reality) keeps the movement for those who enjoy the discoveries and the mysteries that never reveal themselves. How does Daily Alice know what's happening, and how does Sophie deal with her daughter being stolen. How does the family cope with the changling left in her place, and does she exist to anyone but Auberon (really?)?

The story is rife with questions, answers to questions you didn't ask, more questions that will never be answered and throughout it all is the author poet, leading the reader down a road where Faerie might be a very plausible place, just outside our peripheral vision, behind that fence, at a bus stop for which you must ask, and know, but isn't really there, hidden in a house with untold rooms behind a turn you knew was there, but kept forgetting to find....

The world is little, big. Just as a house may increase in size as you explore the smallest rooms, just as you may feel immense while watching the stars knowing and feeling what you do, just as you may enter the smallest garden park in the middle of a city and feel it engulfs you.....so is the world of Faerie--tiny, vast and surrounds....

Non sequiturs (and asides) to no end

Crowley once wrote a decent short story `snow' that was collected in Gardner Dozois's `best of' anthologies, but this novel is humorless pedantry. Crowley seems to have broad-brush ideas (I think very interesting ideas) that are unworkable in his hands, so he does the literary workshop thing: mystify, mystify, and mystify some more, with non-sequiturs and momentum-killers all the way. And big books sell better than small books, this he probably learned with the commercial failure of `engine summer' another that mystified with a like concept: characters who seem to divine (or sense) their own importance in the story being told about them within the story: also moody, humorless and `literary' writing throughout, but with the saving grace of being short.
So what's wrong with `literary' writing?
The storytelling in Little, Big is oblique and disorienting, the book has been compared to the great Colombian's novel, therefore it must be something layered, literary, and far from genre trash, right? And Little, Big is a favorite of Harold Bloom. Those who gave the book more than two stars did so solely on this misguided basis. Harold Bloom is a fraud and bad writer. Bloom wrote a bad novel some years back and is taking his creative frustration out by elevating rubbish like this and dismissing others. Interestingly, Bloom downplays the brilliance of `One Hundred Years of Solitude' (expressing some bafflement as to its importance) in one of his Modern Critical Interpretations. So, Bloom shows his colors. Bloom, the anti-genre aesthete, the enemy of storytelling momentum, a failed storyteller himself who detests the genuine article, even willing to raise high those who are clearly not out of spite and creative dyslexia. Obviously, Crowley has got it in good with him. The author may start with a beautiful schemata, have an inner logic, but he should check and temper the disorientation of his style--not add to it. This book is an essay in how to stop storytelling momentum by obliterating any distinction between synchronic and diachronic movements and not perfectly blending them as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, also told in a fairy-tale style. The latter is stylistically simple, but structurally complex, ending on notes so blackly humorous that even a Russian would cringe, with endings seemingly incompetent yet with an undertow like a roaring train sustaining a momentum unmatched in storytelling, to its very end. In Little, Big on the other hand Crowley tries to approximate this style, but the endings are lame, simply lame, showing that a novel may be whimsical but its handling of basic storytelling elements in cultivating momentum better not be.

Simply Magnificant, Stellar, Wonderful, and Everything Between
The biggest problem with "Little, Big" is that it makes almost anything you read afterward, stale and disappointing. It makes you want to return to Edgewood, it makes you want to meet Auberon and Smokey and Daily Alice all over again, and it makes you wish that this new author could write as well as John Crowley.

"Little, Big" may be the finest piece of English literature produced by a living American author. Crowley, in fact, is so good, that he ranks there with some of the most acclaimed, canonical authors ever. It's a family saga, of the last years of the Drinkwater family, who live on the edge of a wood peppered with fairies. It's a love story, as Daily Alice and Smokey and their children meet, fall in love, deal with love and each other, and live their lives. It's a story of finding things get bigger the further you go in.

The sentences are winding elliptical passages that wrap you into their beauty, wisk you away, and leave you in the most pleasent elation. It takes its time, moves slowly, sets the mood, and throws you in for the curve. The good guys don't always appear good and the villains may not be exactly that.

Crowley plays with fantasy conventions, from the hero's journey to the epic wizard fantasy, and even instances of Shakespeare (notably "A Midsummer Night's Dream") though he merely toys with them and doesn't seriously investigate their causes. This isn't "Lord of the Rings," where more focus is placed on the setting than on the characters, this is almost the American answer to "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and it's just as magnificant, if not moreso. As a fantasy, it's atypical and in fact pages fly by without anything overtly fantastic occurring; there are more important matters afoot.

Who says there isn't conflict? Who says there's no villain? No real action? Anytime anyone mentions this, you have to wonder if they read the book. Yes, these matters are placed more in the background to the characters and their interactions and their own lives, but they're there, from a family's decision to face their Destiny to a politician trying to reclaim a royalty, to scenes involving changelings, kidnappings, and fireworks. To anyone who suggests the novel misses any of those things, I challenge them to actually read closer. To not just gloss over the book, for it's not a book that you gloss over; no, you let it take you in on its terms.

Recommending the book isn't enough, and instead of wondering if you should or shouldn't read this, you need to just walk, not drive, to Edgewood and prepare for one spectacular visit.