Way of All Flesh

Butler spent eleven years writing this explosive portrait of a family and a faith, then hid it from the world until after his death. The novel that helped kill Victorian complacency finally emerged in 1903, and it hit like a bomb. The Pontifex family appears respectable, their home a bastion of Christian virtue, but Butler strips away the facade to reveal something far uglier: generational cruelty disguised as duty, faith weaponized as control. Ernest Pontifex is born into this fortress of repression. His Calvinist upbringing brands him with guilt before he can speak. As he grows, he stumbles through the trials that await any young man raised on lies, each collision with the world leaving him more bewildered about the gap between what he was told and what he finds. This is the book that anticipated everything from Lucky Jim to The Brothers Karamazov: a furious, funny reckoning with the lie that family always means love, and that faith always means truth. It remains essential for anyone who suspects that the people closest to us can be the most dangerous.