Well, I was going to read the ending, but I let that go.
And maybe if you're terribly interested in finding out
how the book comes out, you can buy it.
[INAUDIBLE QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE]
Yeah, no.
I can't tell you that.
They have a daughter, by the way, who figures into it.
A daughter is born with a caul around her head.
I don't know whether you know what that is,
but it's a little tissue that was
supposed to give one magical powers for good or for evil.
The daughter's name is Lucretia, and she
becomes engaged to a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin
Gogarty, who is another Irishman who has come to this area.
And they need Luther Calvin's land for the mines.
Luther Calvin doesn't want to give it to them.
And things work out from there.
If you're really interested, you should
look at the last few pages.
But thank you very much.
Is there any questions?
[CLAPPING]
[FROM AUDIENCE] You see lots of things [INAUDIBLE]
I'm wondering if that [INAUDIBLE] to tell about
people who leave their children [INAUDIBLE] that way
or [INAUDIBLE]
It probably has some great cosmic significance.
[LAUGHING]
No, not necessarily.
It's just fun.
And I'm working with some very obvious irony.
Many, many things I do in here, I
guess you've noticed as I was reading,
are very obvious things.
And I wanted them to be that way.
I'm playing with lots of obvious conventions.
And that's an old 19th-century convention
that can be used ironically and can be used to have some fun.
[INAUDIBLE QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE]
[CHUCKLING]
A good bit of the time.
The ending of the book is kind of serious
and is kind of not serious at the same time.
You see, I'm a great believer in this thing of balance.
And it's so very easy to get so serious
that you're like on the edge of a cliff,
and you fall off the edge of the cliff,
and you have to continually keep undercutting
yourself and jerking yourself back from that edge.
If you're going to write a book that deals with emotions,
the other perhaps easier out is to write a book that
does away with emotions.
That's, in a sense, what we did in revolting
against 19th-century sentimentality.
We did away with emotion almost entirely.
Not all writers, but many writers did.
And now the trick is to find out how
to deal with emotion without becoming sentimental.
And how not to be obvious without meaning to be obvious.
[INAUDIBLE] anything else?
OK, I understand there's a reception in the terrace room.
And I'll be there if any of you have anything else to ask.
Thank you for coming.
Good night.
[CLAPPING]