The Way of All Flesh

For getting one word wrong, "come" mangled into "tum," a small boy is caned before evening prayers are even finished. Samuel Butler would not let this novel be printed while he lived, because it says what his century refused to say aloud: that a father's cruelty, wrapped in duty and the fear of God, is handed down a family like a bad name. Ernest Pontifex gets his from Theobald, who got his from George, and the whole machinery of Victorian piety, of catechisms and canings and Sunday faces, exists mainly to keep the transaction quiet. Butler watches it happen to Ernest in patient, pitiless detail, through disgrace, prison, a marriage that nearly finishes him, until Ernest does the one thing no Pontifex before him managed: he hands his own children to a bargeman and his wife to raise, choosing plainness over gentility, so the poison stops with him. The title is the old phrase for death, the road every mortal body walks. This is the rare, exhilarating book about the man who found another road.