Books like World's End

Okay, so this is my first five-star rating (on Goodreads), & the last book I would have taken such liberties to rave about was the often-mentioned "Middlesex."Omnipresent question: How the HELL did someone concoct such a wonderful yarn?Well, there is plenty to write about. About generations and about curses and about lives well lived and wasted away, lives separated from commonalities that should bring them together otherwise, about the culture particular to the towns upon the Hudson (of which I have read previously--in Allegra Goodman's "Kaaterskill Falls" & about the Jews that inhabit that village). There are Hamletesque ghosts here, and "collisions with history." The main character, who turns out to be just the person you thought he'd turn out to be (ahem--replica of the father), loses limbs essential to staying grounded (hint, hint), and he's indeed lost, floating away from strong associations to the land that the Dutch cultivated. He is one of the most un-complex, yet ambivalent, antiheroes read of late. That I cannot really retell his story, that it takes a few reels of memory to place exactly when I fell for this novel hard is incredible!I cannot describe the feeling of the book. The novel is wisely readable, every character is placed with great care in the plot to do something. Everything in its place. T. C. Boyle pulls off something that could not be done. Boyle understands the American question (which is twofold--leave to embrace the ghosts of the past, or proceed unto the uncertain terrains of the future?); he gives himself fully to a story that occurs in the 1980's & concurrently three centuries before. This is a colonization story in more ways than one. This type of literature, whether American or Dutch, seems so vibrant with possibilities. This one is a must for those in desperate need of knowing that our generation's writers are not to be discounted nor even, for that matter, labeled. Here is an utterly amazing creation that can vouch for exactly that!