Peace was published by Harper & Row in 1975, and it is perhaps Wolfe’s most uncanny achievement — a novel that appears, on first reading, to be a gentle, nostalgic memoir of small-town Midwestern life, and that reveals itself, on closer examination, to be a ghost story and possibly a confession of murder.
Alden Dennis Weer is an elderly man (or so it seems) sitting in a house (or so it seems) in a small town in the American Midwest, remembering his life. His recollections are non-linear, digressive, and full of embedded stories — tales told by his aunts, his grandfather, his neighbors, visitors to the town. The prose is warm, leisurely, and apparently artless. The scenes of childhood in a pre-war small town — ice cream parlors, county fairs, family dinners, eccentric relatives — evoke a lost American pastoral.
But details accumulate that cannot be reconciled with a simple memoir. Weer’s house contains rooms that correspond to episodes in his memory — as if the house is constructed from memory rather than existing in physical space. Characters who cross Weer die shortly afterward, often in convenient accidents. The framing device suggests that Weer is not writing but haunting — that he is a ghost trapped in the recursive structure of his own recollections, unable to escape the house of memory he has built.
The novel has generated more critical argument than almost any other work of American fiction its length. Is Weer a murderer? How many people has he killed? Is the entire narrative a purgatorial experience? Wolfe has declined to answer these questions directly, noting only that “everyone who has read the book carefully enough to form a theory seems to arrive at a different one.”
Collecting Peace
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1975): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$500
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- Signed copies: $300–$700