
Castle
The opening lines of J. Robert Lennon’s fifth novel, Castle, describe a landscape of impenetrable wilderness, an image that comes to pervade the book. The narrator, a plainspoken man named Eric Loesch, has just returned to his hometown and purchased a large tract of undeveloped forest on the “far western edge of the county,” with only a dilapidated farmhouse at its edge. Loesch has almost no family and few friends and seems determined to avoid any connection to his old life in the area. “I tend to align myself,” he explains, “against the present cultural obsession with the past. . . . I do not