The world's room

About this book

"When Willy and Lorna Hofmann's seventeen-year-old son, Erich, commits suicide in 1969, his younger brother asks to be called by the dead boy's name. Already deeply affected by more than two years of separation and darkly comical disarray, his mother, father, and older sister accept the offer, setting in motion an unspoken conspiracy to sacrifice the living child to the memory of the dead.". "Told nearly two decades later by the surviving "Erich," The World's Room is a haunting yet humorous novel, evocative of the changing American culture of the times.". "In the summer of 1967, Lorna Hofmann spirits her three children away from their father, a brilliant but phobic Columbia University professor. After two years of incessant travel that takes them deep into Mexico, the foursome settles in phantasmagoric Venice Beach, California, where the first signs of Erich's mental decay appear. Over the next twenty years Willy and Lorna's own untold history plays itself out as their two surviving children learn to find their own ways in the world. The surviving Erich, now an adult, endeavors to understand his parents, with their own flaws and suffering, and to come to terms with the tacit agreement they all had made when he was just a boy."--BOOK JACKET.