The Entrance to Porlock (1970)
Book Description
Peter Ringkoping’s decision to donate a large portion of his land to an old friend is a cause of consternation for his family.
A published author and the owner of a secondhand-book store, the elderly Peter has grown distant, and seems to prefer the company of the ghosts of his favorite writers to that of his loved ones. The sudden announcement of his desire to give the land to Hans Strasser, the aging warden of a local community for people with emotional and intellectual disabilities, leaves his wife, Alice, and his middle-aged sons, Nels and Tommy, fearing that he has lost his mind, and stricken at the prospect of missing out on the inheritance that they had hoped would eventually be theirs. When Peter resolves to visit Strasser’s community before signing the deeds over to him, Nels and Tommy begrudgingly decide to accompany him, the latter bringing his nineteen-year-old son, Tip, along for the ride.
Peter’s difficulties in relating to his sons, Nels’s problems at work and his fear of death, Tommy’s struggles with his own immaturity, and Tip’s adolescent sense of disorientation and paralysis ensure that the pilgrimage is spiritual as well as physical, as each seeks to come to terms with his own difficult circumstances, all the while wondering what awaits when they meet the mercurial Strasser.
Reviews
“In his new novel Frederick Buechner again shows his unique talent for making wonders real and the real wonderful. The book opens up dimensions of our modern hurts and impasses that are missing from much of our fiction.”
— Amos N. Wilder, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School
“with his fifth novel, Buechner nonetheless reiterates his belief that reality, though puzzling and difficult, is fraught with meaning”
— Dale Brown, The Book of Buechner
“...Like all of his fiction, it is a subtle, deliberate, patient attempt to arrive at the truth of things.”
— John Barkham, Saturday Review
“The intervals between Frederick Buechner's thoughtful, serious novels are too long for this reader…a novel of substance…”
— Publishers' Weekly
“related with compelling warmth and engaging fantasy”
— Marjorie Casebier McCoy, Frederick Buechner: novelist of the lost and found
“There appears every now and again a lyrical, dreamlike novel that is more poem than prose, more parable than story. Such novels incapacitate conventional critical faculties; we do not understand and evaluate them rationally but rather are immersed, lulled, and transported, as in listening to music, into a shadowy world where feelings are evoked and nothing is explained. The Entrance to Porlock is that kind of novel. One is not sure after reading it whether one has read or imagined it. The contradictory sense of time contributes to this blurred impression. The entire novel takes place within 24 hours, but the movement in the characters' minds back and forth in time and the spiritual distance they travel makes the actual time span seem immeasurable.”
— Diana Loercher, Christian Science Monitor
“In Porlock as in the earlier novels, Buechner paints on a small canvas, exploring the personal hungerings for meaning and love and the complex and fragile relationships among a small group of people bound together by ties of family and friendship.”
— James Woelfel, Theology Today
“One of the finest pieces of imaginative prose I have come across for some time...a beautiful, thoughtful, and often witty novel whose music will, I am sure, reverberate in the imagination for a long time.”
— Vernon Scannell, The Irish Press
