Gripping, adventurous ... Although Weil strays from his through-line and into verbal thickets, his knotty language reveals an earthy, off-kilter quality in Silas, a truth told slant. Weil uses internal rhymes and a profusion of participles; fragments float across his pages like flotsam ... Weil’s divided narrative reflects a divided self, a country divided on the cusp of a cataclysmic civil war, inflamed by slavery and conquest of Indigenous lands. In our 250th anniversary year he steers clear of grandiose pronouncements, allowing Silas’s singular imagination to carry the larger epic
