Castaway

The two poles of a reader's reaction to James Gould Cozzens's Castaway might be to 1) throw the book against a wall, or 2) plunge deep into thought (ideally with the help of a fellow reader) about its meaning. I fall somewhere in between. The story is simple enough, about a lone man in a multistory department store after an unnamed catastrophic event outside. He gathers material to make a fort, looks for food and weapons, and then there is an event and a "trick" ending. What struck me before the ending was the pointlessness of the man's labors: all of those efforts, to what end? Does he believe he will be able to live out his days in the empty store? It's the survival instinct on display, and it is, ironically, not wholly rational. Cozzens's prose is thorny but usually worth the effort to untangle. I ordered this book after learning that Sam Peckinpah had a lifelong wish to turn the story into a movie. Reading it with that in mind, and seeing in my mind's eye what he might have done with it, added to the pleasure of reading.