seek out what motivates Tull to try to destroy Gwyn Barry; to try to understand why Scozzy would want to hurt Barry; to see some reason in Gina's betrayal of Tull

In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me. you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps have melted and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa.

McCandless found out about his father's double life and confided in his sister that this discovery made his H entire childhood seem like a fiction·

As it turns out. McCandless and Krakauer had much in common. They read and were moved by many of the same authors; they fell in love, like many lonely alienated,

McCandless died in the woods not because he couldn't find enough food to survive, but because he ate seeds that no one knew to be poisonous. Relying on Tanaina Plant-lore to guide his gatherings in the wild, McCandless trusted its author completely As he grew weaker and as game grew scarcer, McCandless began to eat the roots of a species of wild potato that the book identified as nontoxic.

ultimately undone by the great trust he placed in the written word.

McCandless moved through the world trying to convert others to his point

o read the books that had so moved him

. He trav-eled to California, canoed down into Mexico, made his way toward Alaska.

For those reading this version of McCandless's life, the loss of a young man who wanted to com­mune with the natural world and the disappearance of a world untouched by the mercenary desires of human so­ciety are developments to be mourned

have done, whatever we are doing, and whatever we plan to do will never have any lasting significance.

So the information that comes with age

Tull, heading to Tull's neighborhood determined to kidnap Marco.

Tull understands that he lives in a world defined by random acts of violence and he is afraid, not for his own safety;

As it goes with the world, so it goes with the novel: to seek out what motivates Tull to try to destroy Gwyn Barry; to try to understand why Scozzy would want to hurt Barry; to see some reason in Gina's betrayal of Tull

but because we no longer live in a world where human action can be explained.

he may be acting out the aggressions of an abandoned child

is deter-mined to hurt a writer, preferably Gwyn Barry. Scozzy may be motivated by his own hatred of Amelior, which he refers to as a "total crock" and "complete crap" (114)

When Tull's initial efforts to harm his rival fail, he turns to Steve Cousins, a financially secure, semi-retired criminal, who now entertains himself by pursuing "recreational" adventures in his profession: his spe-cialty, as he defines it, is "fuck[ing] people up" for sport (116

pieties

"we get smaller" (93). We can see the effects of this in our literary creations, Tull argues: "First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers. then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin" (92)

in the world Amis has created for his readers, pretentious, sentimental slop of this kind has adulation heaped upon it, while work like the kind Richard Tull produces -work that strains mightily to achieve a high seri-ousness, work that is replete with veiled literary references, work that endlessly announces its indebtedness to the earlier classics -actually physically harms the few who can bear to read it, causing migraines, see-ing disorders, and even forced hospitalizations.

that writing provides access to immortality.