White Apples Hardcover – 1 Sept. 2002

I got very little sleep while reading this because I just could not put the book down. It was the literary equivalent of putting superglue on the cover.This is the first book where Carroll uses the omniscient third person narrative. all his previous novels are written in the first person. The change definitely works. Hitchcock once said that if you have four characters playing cards round a table and a bomb goes off in a briefcase hidden under the table, that's a surprise. If you tell the audience about the bomb and let the characters continue to play cards, that's suspense.The use of the third person narrative allows Carroll to show us the bombs under the tables, but he also never fails to throw in several surprises along the way.Like everything else he's written, this is highly reccommended

surprising

I've read every one of Carroll's novels and I thought this one his best to date. I read it on holiday, which only added to the escapism that his novels plunge the reader into. Carroll's ideas and plot twists are a delight and I shall be buying a few extra copies this year to give to friends for Christmas presents. It's also very well written (as usual).

Books like "Bones of the Moon" and "A Child Across The Sky" had seductive prose, exciting momentum and moral unease. But Carroll's last few books have been increasingly indulgent. This one is a tumble of half-baked ideas that are abandoned as soon as they are introduced, having achieved nothing but the filling of pages.Example: one incomprehensible character is terrified to learn that he must go visit the King of the Park. Then this turns out to be a bunch of barbers. Only, no, in fact what they do is remake HIM as the King, which means a remould on his face and a bunch of never-specified powers. We never see him use any of these powers, and by the end of the book he's back to normal. So why did Carroll feel it worthwhile to shove 20 pages of useless drivel in the middle of the book?Each novel seems to turn God into a different diagram, and the gimmick has become threadbare. There is no emotional or thematic punch to this book, and what it really needed was an editor capable of saying No! I've given up on him.

Much as it pains me to write this, as a longtime Carroll fan, but this book is a oddly poor example from a normally great writer. Carroll seems to have had too many ideas here, without a will to resolve or even fully flesh them out. Although he rarely attempts to justify the curious events in his stories, the devices and twists come thick and fast here, but, for me at least, fail to advance the story in any useful manner.White Apples is riddled with inconsistancies, plot and character threads that go nowhere and ultimately seems to rush to a clumsy 'time to finish the book' conclusion. His characters really fail to elicit any emotional response for me - and that, in a Carroll book, is very strange, but his writing style has become increasingly cruel and detached with each book.If you've never read Jonathan Carroll, please do - he's normally wonderful, but don't start here.

Plodding story line that takes forever to develop. Creeping suburban banality throughout - token gay person - 'importance' of kids - blah blah blah. Droning dialogue that goes nowhere. And I must quote the ultimate in dreary, banal internal dialogue: "Riding back up to the sixth floor in the elevator, Ettrich thought about what both men had said. They were right - the three of them had in a bizarre way been reincarnated. But what good was the experience if you had no idea of what to do with it? What good was a lesson if you learned nothing from it?" ... come on....

I am biased. Jonathan Caroll is one of my favorite writers. It doesn't matter if I'm reading one of his best or least novels. His exploration of the metaphysical within a physical world that is easily recognizable consistently captivates me. In the interface we inhabit, between fundamental spiritual visions suited to a global village, Carroll's bit of adult magic is welcome. I've read all his novels, even Child Across The Sky, which I had to order from England. I cannot find a reasonably priced used copy of his short story collection Painted Hand, or his novella, Black Cocktail, or an odd piece called The Heidelberg Cylinder. Nonetheless, I toast what I can get my hands on.

まず冒頭のシークエンスが、絶妙。Carroll作品の多くはかなり洒落た恋愛小説風に始まるが、本作品はそのディテールとモダンなセンスで秀逸。生と死、というよりもCarrollのテーマは天使・神サイドと悪魔サイドの闘いとでもいうものに変化して、より軽やかにダイナミックになった。ちょっとヴァイオレンス描写がグロテスクな感じがあって（Clive Barkerっぽい）、より映画的な印象が出てきたけど個人的にはちょっと好きではない。この後の展開に期待。

Carroll creatively appropriates the Orpheus/Eurydice myth with a twist in this new novel -- a woman returns to the land of the dead to retrieve her husband and the father of her child. Carroll's descriptions of living death -- of the experience of death itself -- is as haunting as the story itself is touchingly humane. It's ultimately a love story, a love story that makes a very real, human, even flawed love shared by real, human, flawed characters a love that's stronger than death or the impulse to control. In this novel, like others, Carroll stretches our conceptions of reality so that we can properly see the mundane.

I just finished this book this morning. I only had 6 pages to go. Can you imagine putting a book down with just 6 pages left? Neither could I-- until I read White Apples. It just didn't really matter to me what happened at the end.I like quirky books, especially authors like Tom Robbins and Vonnegut, so I thought this would be a good choice. With those authors, you get great story telling combined with imaginative ideas. Their writing is effortlessly funny and you have something to think about when you finish one of their novels.With White Apples, you get sloppy story telling with ideas that seem to be weird just for the sake of being weird. At one point there is a giant lipstick-wearing rat. He comes out of nowhere and is gone, never to be heard from again. I suppose it was an attempt at humor; but if you're not sure if something is suppose to be funny, then it isn't.If that wasn't bad enough, the poor ideas are executed in a sloppy manner. I really don't like to have to go back and reread sentences just to figure out where the comma should go in order to understand what is being said, or what is going on. It seems that the author confuses breaking the rules for creativity.It's possible that there is a good book in there somewhere, Carroll just doesn't have the talent,or maybe he was just too lazy to do the extensive rewrites that were required to make this book worth reading.If you like unusual writing, do yourself a favor and read any of Robbin's books--especially Jitterbug Perfume.