SOURCE: "A Collision with History," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 1, No. 12, August 26, 1988, p. 36.

Dyer is an English critic. In the following review of World's End, he maintains that complex time shifts and elaborate familial relationships exacerbate the novel's slow pace.

In his last two books—the novel Budding Prospects and Greasy Lake, a collection of stories—Coraghessan Boyle took off in the opening paragraphs like a sprinter exploding from the blocks. For the first 150 pages of [World's End], by contrast, you are left flicking back to the list of characters trying to grapple with dozens of almost identical names: remember all those Aurelianos and Arcadios in One Hundred Years of Solitude? By then, by the time the narrative stagger unwinds and a tangled genealogy is emerging, the general shape of the novel is becoming clear.

Essentially the book chronicles the interlocked destinies of three families in the Hudson...