Refiner's fire

The hero is Marshall Pearl born in a sea battle in an illegal immigrant ship of the coast of Palestine in 1947. Adopted into America by the wealthy and childless Livingstons, he grows up on a Hudson Valley estate, taught by his adventures on the river riding ice floes, jumping freights, climbing precipices and shaped by the imperatives of his own personality and destiny – his peculiar sensitivity to light, his astonishing seizures and visions, his battle with an eagle. Always restless, always attracted by forces and affinities just beyond his grasp, he begins to move outward in childhood for an idyllic summer in the Rockies; as an adolescent to the tropical forests of Jamaica and the Rastaferian Rebellion; as a young man to the graceful traditions of Harvard, to the Great Plains, to New Orleans and Charleston, to the Alps, and finally to Israel. En route we see him in trouble and in triumph, in and out of scrapes, now broke and hungry, now surrounded by riches, now on the bottom and out of control, now on top and in command. And he is always in love: with sunburn (always perfect) Lydia, or with the lithe and (almost) unattainable Dash, or with gentle Alexa, or with the strong wild and beautiful Nancy May Baker...until one becomes central to this life.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.