"Lanton; the Americans lived there. All the cursing, spitting, ragged tired talk of days and dollars bled into the rural streets. There was stale contentment and it was predictable. Cheap rent. Old mills. 'Day in, day out, we do this all the same. We are noble, and we work all the same.' They voted on party lines. There were mothers and fathers sleeping in separate rooms. When it was no longer enough, they slept in separate homes with separate lovers. But they still believed in their way.
There were lakes, rivers, rushing waters, stagnant ponds, stones awash in currents, trees of the New England forest, mud and fields, the hum of the distant trains as they carried industry towards the plain, the factory smoke clawing at the sun's throne, the towers of steel that hung strings of rusted latter rungs, the telephone poles crooked and brushed by the feather flown wings of pine trees, the birds calling home across the horizon line echo and the sorrowed deer that lost a mother to the hunter's gun, the bridges that hung, crumbling slowly, above the steady passage of the current, the sounds of wrenches turning and falling from the stiff hands of worn men, the ragged hum of diesel engines carrying heavy machinery to a new lot, a new site, for a new home. It was all there, perfectly rural, inharmonious, everlastingly without a known purpose other than to exist, as men must, in a world that no faith or science could and never will be able to explain.
It was a chaotic sight to behold and sound to hear, all somehow flowing in unison with all of the mechanics of mankind. In that sense, the great course of cities and the roaming sprawls of the Midwest were not so much different than the Lanton reality. All land, all the concrete madness of Manhattan and Chicago or Los Angeles, all the grazed prairie and the open New Mexican desert, was part of that one perfect image. It all belonged to movement and time."
The Waning Sun follows protagonist Parker Edison as he journeys through the final stages of youth in search of love, truth, and compassion. He stumbles upon lust and ventures into the American West where his faith of which he is uncertain is ultimately tested.
