In A Ring of Endless Light (1980, ISBN 0-374-36299-8), Zachary reenters Vicky's life the following summer, having failed to write or call during the period covered in The Young Unicorns. As the story opens, Zach's apparently suicidal behavior in a small boat near fictional Seven Bay Island has, in the eyes of Vicky and her sister, resulted in the death by heart attack of Commander Rodney of the Coast Guard. Vicky and her family are on the island caring for her grandfather, retired Reverend Eaton, who is dying of leukemia. Zach himself has recently experienced the death of his mother "in an automobile accident in California" which he says was "her own fault." This is one of many instances of death and dying mentioned in the book. As Zach competes with Leo Rodney and Adam Eddington for Vicky's attention, he takes her to a concert and up in a plane, but again behaves recklessly, both behind the wheel of a car and during a flying lesson. In a moment of crisis, Zach deserts Vicky at a nearby hospital on the island. He did this not because of selfish reasons, but because the nauseating smell of the hospital reminded him of his time spent there.
Read more about this topic: Zachary Gray
Famous quotes containing the words endless light, ring, endless and/or light:
“I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,”
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“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet this is you.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)