About halfway through The Late Child, there's a paragraph summarizing everything that's happened up to that point: "Harmony thought how strange life was. Her son, who was only five, had just talked to the President and now was talking to the First Lady. Her sister Neddie had just refused to eat any food whose name started with a k. She herself had just told her oldest friend, who was gay, that she wished he wasn't, so they could marry. Four men with turbans were there, and two black teenagers who lived in a Dumpster in New Jersey. She herself had no job and no prospects and her brother was in jail in Tarwater for making obscene phone calls. Pepper, her daughter, was dead of AIDS. It was a lot to adjust to, if adjust was the right word."Oddly enough, it's all perfectly believable, but that there are broadly comic aspects is not the novel's failing. Harmony is a likable character, but she's about the only one. Almost everyone else ranges from mildly to seriously irritating, in particular five-year-old Eddie, whose precociousness falls short of obnoxiousness, but only barely. The biggest problem for me was that I couldn't feel sympathy for Harmony and Laurie in their mourning of Pepper because Pepper was a horrible human being. She was an amoral opportunist in The Desert Rose and although The Late Child opens with the news of her death, what we later learn of her years in New York indicate that she continued to be pretty awful. Her awfulness makes all the grieving seem not suspect exactly, but also not all that compelling.
