A review by flogigyahoo
This Magnificent Desolation by Thomas O'Malley

3.0

I wanted to like Thomas O'Malley's novel This Magnificent Desolation but found it much too long--400 pages. Duncan is left by his mother at an orphanage run by monks in Minnesota and understands that his mother and father are dead. It takes a quarter of the book to find that his mother is alive and coming to take him home. Duncan is fascinated by the Apollo landings but is told that the astronauts never got back home; it was a Hollywood movie. Duncan sees the landing rerun on TV and from the reaction of Neil Armstrong to the lunar landscape we get the book's title. (Just 3 days ago I watched the movie First Man, on that very event. Also I too grew up in an orphanage so could relate to Duncan's unhappiness at life in his orphanage home which is described in great detail but quickly becomes repetitious.) Life with his mother is also problematic. She was an opera singer who lost her voice and is now poor and works at low paying jobs and a relationship with a war veteran suffering from trauma. Duncan begins life facing his own profound traumas but his hopeless story goes on far too long.