Description

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Dale Peck’s second novel offers a searing, nuanced portrait of a marriage across the decades. Beatrice and Henry—the parents of the protagonist of Peck’s debut novel, Martin and John—are first drawn together when the teenaged Henry is battling a brain tumor that he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they’re still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again. Peck bisects the story of Henry and Beatrice’s marriage with a stunning 50-page memoir about his own father, mother, and three stepmothers, which combines with the primary narrative to build an unforgettable and deeply moving book about the ways that family both creates and destroys us.

The Law of Enclosures is the second volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

About the Author

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Dale Peck is the author of twelve books in a variety of genres, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he teaches in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program.

Praise For…

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Praise for The Law of Enclosures
 
“An astonishing work of emotional wisdom . . . Peck has galvanized his reputation as one of the most eloquent voices of his generation.”
—The New York Times

“With his first novel, 1993’s Martin and John, Dale Peck drew critical hosannas for his uncannily authoritative grasp of style, which would have done credit to any veteran and was especially impressive given his youth . . . The book put some readers off, though, with its self-consciously complex stories-within-a-story structure, Peck’s newest effort, The Law of Enclosures, is if anything more pretentious in its concept, and if possible more virtuosic in its execution.”
—Washington Post Book World

“The prose is so unobtrusively graceful that it may take you a while to notice how beautiful it is . . . Peck is as piercing on old age as on youth, as comfortable writing about women’s bodies as about men’s.”
—The New Yorker

“Few writers have Dale Peck’s nerve. He writes without secrets, packing his novels with the intimacies of his life, his family, his sexuality . . . There is an extraordinary sense of the risk and adventure of writing in every page of this novel.”
—The Nation

“Shatteringly honest, disturbing and provocative . . . A masterful confrontation with truth in the guise of a brilliantly conceived and executed work of fiction.”
—San Francisco Chronicle of Books
 
“Peck’s no-holds-barred writing—which throw in everything, even titling a chapter after the kitchen sink—is what makes this familiar domestic plot worthwhile. He careens through catalogs of mundane items to reveal meaning . . . Beatrice and Henry may save themselves finally by refusing to turn their lives into a story, but we’re richer for the fact that Peck told one anyway.”
—Boston Globe
 
“Remarkable . . . This curious, hump-backed book, with its mixture of private rage and accomplished world-making, and its absolute reality, is a very rate, original, and cherishable achievement. There is nothing else like it.”
—Guardian