The Dying of the Light: A Novel

by Robert Goolrick

Overview

From the author of the bestselling A Reliable Wife comes a dramatic, passionate tale of a glamorous Southern debutante who marries for money and ultimately suffers for love—the literary love-child of William Faulkner and Dominick Dunne.

It begins with a house and ends in ashes . . .

Diana Cooke was "born with the century" and came of age just after World War I. The daughter of Virginia gentry, she knew early that her parents had only one asset, besides her famous beauty: their stately house, Saratoga, the largest in the commonwealth, which has hosted the crème of society and Hollywood royalty. Though they are land-rich, the Cookes do not have the means to sustain the estate. Without a wealthy husband, Diana will lose the mansion that has been the heart and soul of her family for five generations.

The mysterious Captain Copperton is an outsider with no bloodline but plenty of cash. Seeing the ravishing nineteen-year-old Diana for the first time, he’s determined to have her. Diana knows that marrying him would make the Cookes solvent and ensure that Saratoga will always be theirs. Yet Copperton is cruel as well as vulgar; while she admires his money, she cannot abide him. Carrying the weight of Saratoga and generations of Cookes on her shoulders, she ultimately succumbs to duty, sacrificing everything, including love.

Luckily for Diana, fate intervenes. Her union with Copperton is brief and gives her a son she adores. But when her handsome, charming Ashton, now grown, returns to Saratoga with his college roommate, the real scandal and tragedy begins.

Reveling in the secrets, mores, and society of twentieth-century genteel Southern life, The Dying of the Light is a romance, a melodrama, and a cautionary tale told with the grandeur and sweep of an epic Hollywood classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062678232
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	177,687
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Robert Goolrick is the author of the bestselling novels A Reliable Wife, Heading Out to Wonderful, and The Fall of Princes, and the acclaimed memoir The End of the World as We Know It. He lives and works in Baltimore.

Editorial Reviews

The unique intense richness of The Dying of The Light makes this novel a fevered dream of sacrifice, sex, luxury, manners, honor, violence, submission, tragedy, destiny, secrets, beauty and melancholy that holds you in an embrace that tightens through the novel, leaving you spent and transformed.

Joan Juliet Buck

Robert Goolrick has created a mesmerizing, evocative novel brimming with passion and tragedy. His portrait of a depleted Southern family, hoping to reinvigorate itself and its magnificently neglected estate, is at once thrilling and devastating.

Garth Stein

Passion, loneliness, decadence, and sexuality are all powerfully portrayed in this beautifully written novel.

Sarah Gruen

07/23/2018
Goolrick (A Reliable Wife) tells the intriguing and heartbreaking story of American debutante Diana Cooke, whose difficult adult life culminated in her disappearance after her family’s estate, Saratoga, burned to the ground. Diana, a beautiful, tomboyish girl, had caring parents who doted on her, and also reinforced the notion that if Diana didn’t marry someone wealthy, they could lose Saratoga. Diana, just coming into her twenties, meets Captain Copperton, an older gentleman of new money, and the two quickly marry. Known as a charmer, the captain turns out to be a cruel husband. Together, Diana and Copperton have a son, Ashton, who proves to be Diana’s only solace. But after Copperton dies in a horse race, Ashton is sent away, and Diana is left alone with Saratoga, barely able to make ends meet as his fortune is in limbo. Eventually, a grown Ashton returns and begins to set Saratoga on the right course once again, until his devotion to his mother is challenged when she begins a love affair with his closest friend, Gibby. In the end, everyone must overcome their own prejudices to forge a way forward. Filled with glamour and devastating family scheming, this American tragedy swathed in honor, money, and betrayal will please fans of dramatic, sweeping historicals. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Goolrick’s best book yet. A brilliant mashup of all the old greats, Faulkner and Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence, The Dying of the Light reads like Absolom, Absolom! meets The Great Gatsby meets Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” 

Philipp Meyer

03/01/2018
Coming of age after World War I, striking Diana Cooke holds her nose as she marries Captain Copperton, nasty and vulgar but rich enough to assure the future of the Cooke family home, Saratoga. The real trouble starts years later when her son, Ashton, comes home from college. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2018-04-16
A blue-blooded Southern belle's grandiose life is upended by the desire that consumes her.Goolrick (The Fall of Princes, 2015, etc.) returns to the gothic influences that marked his first two novels, heightened here by an operatic arc that doesn't quite ring true. A modern-day prologue finds a young reporter sifting through the ashes of Saratoga, an enormous Virginia mansion that burned to the ground in 1941, taking lives with it. The novel itself is the story of Diana Cooke, who in 1919 is the debutante of the year, destined for high society. On Diana's burdened shoulders lies the responsibility of saving Saratoga, her family's home, by marrying Capt. Copperton, a vulgar and violent man who fathers Diana's one saving grace, a son named Ashton. After Copperton dies in an accident, Diana retreats to the lonely halls of Saratoga. Her life becomes infinitely more complicated when Ashton returns from college with his handsome roommate, Gibby Cavenaugh, in tow. Ashton commits himself to fixing up Saratoga, bringing in an eccentric librarian, Lucius Walter, and a high-spirited decorator, Rose de Lisle. Gibby, meanwhile, commits himself to fulfilling the pent-up desires of the not-so-modest Diana Cooke Copperton. As they say, drama ensues. There is an accident. A suicide. A fistfight and a near drowning. "Secrets revealed about the true state of things," writes Goolrick. "An accounting. Cards shown." Through it all develops the complex, unconventional triangle between Diana and "the single godlike creature her two men had become in her misted eyes." Goolrick's writing is always lyrical, and even simple lines like "They tried so hard it broke their hearts," or "Love, for him, was archeological, a dig for a treasure he would never find," are bitterly poetic. Yet stripped to its core, the story is soapy, over-the-top, and plunging toward an inevitable finale.A lurid and ultimately tragic tale revolving around a woman willing to burn her life to the ground.

Kirkus Reviews

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