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Filtered through the mad wit of Billy Brown, these grotesque gyrations sometimes threaten to spin out of control into pure centrifugal farce. But at his best Novelist Miller has come close to creating a comic epic celebrating the lunatic fringes of a genuine American phenomenon—a young nation's yearning for final answers and impossible perfections, its fears that a great dream has somehow been laid waste in the pillaging of a rich continent for material wellbeing.
Inevitably the Second Coming at Twelvepalms is a fiasco, attended largely by crackpots ("You know, the ones who write books about their trips to Venus"). No one scorns them more than Brown. But, like them, he cannot give up his obsession. "I'll save (I will) this apple world," he says at last, "this sweet nut, this beauty, beauty. Ah, listen, hear the bugle blow. Beleaguered pioneers, hold out! Only hold out!"