The Lynching of Orin Newfield - Softcover

Goldberg, Gerald Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345024168 ISBN 13: 9780345024169

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1971

Synopsis

A skillful horror tale with peripheral sociological and philosophical emanations, which oddly enough, gains, rather than loses, from the same caustic bite Goldberg applied in the satirical The National Standard (1968). Orin Newfield, a strenuously successful dairy farmer in the town of Farnum, Vermont, and an Ahab with a mouth like a cow shed, is driven by a rage of cosmic dimensions. Orin's fires were stoked early on when as a youngster he had inadvertently caused his father's death. (It was his flash recognition of his father's impotence and tolerance of being pushed around that caused him to give the home-barbering bib an extra sharp twist.) Now middle-aged, Orin cusses out man and God, specializes in gut insults, defeats his good and gentle wife, Alma, and on Christmas Day beats up his drunken handyman for spilled milk. Outraged, the townsfolk bring him to trial but Alma's sacrificial lying acquits him. Nevertheless Orin, scalded by the threat of weakness, fights free from dependence: ""I don't want to be protected. . . . I want to know what's happening to me. I want to know that I'm alive."" And the townsfolk huddle and come up with the instinctively right weapon--a pretense that he is dead and does not exist. Alma, strained beyond endurance, also leaves him ill the same fashion. In revenge Orin hangs himself, after coolly laying out clues pointing to a lynch murder. A high altitude performance, at the close of which the glinting windshields of New York invaders indicate an end to archetypal Yankee enclosures. The Last Puritan--with an extra Y chromosome.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1971
• ISBN 10: 0345024168
• ISBN 13: 9780345024169
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 216