In the end, equilibrium is reached. Everyone in the novel shifts in each other’s place and role. Actually, in each other’s life: “Make him pay for what he’s made me suffer, sweetheart. Be me for him like you said a while ago which made me so mad cause it was the truth,” the renderer commands Brian. The master becomes slave, the murderer the murdered. Vengeance is carried out by those who love the avenger. Purdy seems to think that human interconnection and communication on all levels is always possible, and that the belief that there are obscure, unfathomable recesses in any one of us is wrong. These dark areas in fact become strikingly visible during a crisis, when the volcano erupts, whether its bowels be filled with hatred or love. It’s the mystery of any physical and emotional bond, a mystery which bespeaks a telepathic quality in human relationships which Purdy has scrutinized and represented with unparalleled profundity.

It’s the depth of this human bondage which sometimes makes his works seem unreal, or grotesque, but they are in fact neither. Unreal and grotesque are the supposedly realistic novels where everybody speaks or thinks like a prototype, an emblem, an abstract ego, but behind his words and thoughts, and around him, there is nothing. Everything is so painfully accurate, so exact, that it sounds false. Has any of us ever really experienced love or hatred as shown in these so called realistic novels? With all their flourishes in sexual descriptions, the affectation in the endless brooding, the mind-searching for the perfect sentence to impress the reader? Who on earth thinks so pompously like those people? Realist writers are, by and large, mannerists. They may seize the spirit of the time, or rather, the spirit of the day, but their characters are simply put all together in the bag, hoping that because of this confinement they will give the appearance of caring for each other.