As for pain, loss, and heartbreak, "that was all still in the future, hundreds of years from now in a land not yet discovered," Burt believes. "It could all still be prevented."
Burt is the sincere, inept, and historically lost narrator of Tod Wodicka's generously titled first novel. Hopeless at navigating fin-de-siecle America, Burt spends his time clothed in a tunic and sandals, buzzed on mead, and if not tilting at windmills then at least evoking a world where his wife, Kitty, is still alive and his children, June and Tristan, don't despise him. Faced with his familial ruin, most of it his making, he has fully retreated into a medievally themed society that he founded, the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained. All has not been well.
By the time we catch up with Burt at the novel's start, it's 1998 and his wife has been dead for two years. Burt has bravely taken a plane to Germany, then embarked on a car trip to Prague. (Both modes of transport are "OOP," or Out of Period, not native to his beloved Dark Ages. So, too, is coffee.) The reason for his risk is simple: He wants to get his son back.
Wodicka's prose is a revelation. A schoolroom clock is described as "worn raw by stares . . . the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards." On a wet road, a car's taillights turn "water to wine." At every step, "All Shall Be" asks us to see creation anew.
Wodicka's missteps are minor and few. The novel's first third is unnecessarily cluttered by side characters: a Brazilian travel companion, a coterie of Hildegard von Bingen chanters. A spate of italicized passages, third-person narration of Kitty's childhood, take us too far from Burt's head.
