Dante's Indiana
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A Divine Comedy of our times."—John Irving, author of The World According to Garp
"This book is a miracle.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021
Following Original Prin, a NYTBR Editor’s Choice and Globe and Mail Best Book, Dante’s Indiana is an extraordinary journey through the divine comedies and tragedies of our time.
Middle-aged, married, but living on his own, Prin has lost his way. Desperate for money and purpose, he moves to small-town Indiana to work for an evangelical millionaire who’s building a theme park inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He quickly becomes involved in the difficult lives of his co-workers and in the wider struggles of their opioid-ravaged community while trying to reconcile with his distant wife and distant God. Both projects spin out of control, and when a Black teenager is killed, creationists, politicians and protesters alike descend. In the midst of this American chaos, Prin risks everything to help the lost and angry souls around him while searching for his own way home. Affecting and strange, intimate and big-hearted, Dante’s Indiana is a darkly divine comedy for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boyagoda's playful if smug second installment of a planned trilogy (after Original Prin) follows a hapless middle-aged Canadian academic through an outlandish career change. Prin loses his job at 41 when his college shuts down. With their house undergoing renovation, his American wife and kids have departed for Indiana, where he joins them and finds work helping to design a theme park modeled after Dante's Divine Comedy, and attempts to win his wife back from the Mormon ex-boyfriend who is making moves on her. The theme park project, always precarious, runs into trouble when a boy named Garyon is killed by police in Chicago, and anti-racist protestors surround the park on the assumption that the name's similarity to Geryon, the beast whose name they've given to the primary roller coaster in the Inferno section of the park, is somehow related. The thin plot gives Boyagoda a chance to indulge to the point of overload in crafting whimsical names and descriptions of theme park rides, and to paint a scathing portrait of an "inland America" populated by child abusers, opioid users, and clueless fundamentalist Christians who are trying to invent chastity pills. The satire may resonate with sympathetic readers, but the underdeveloped characters won't. In the end, this is fluff with very little substance.
