The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[Mark Kohut]

Chap 1 introduces many key characters and also provides a 
kind of stakes-raising very ambitious metaphor as backstory, as history: America 
is/was
a guilt-ridden Puritanical House of Seven Gables kind of country.

Which Rev Gwyon sees anthropologically and the narrator sees in the whole
revelatory tradition of such that The Golden Bough intorduced. 

It all goes way back is repeated. 

Young Wyatt almost dies but becomes an artist; an artist who gives up doing 
original
works in order to make a living doing near-perfect forgeries--imitations of 
earlier great artists. 


America is a country that lives fraudulently, perhaps the metaphor goes?

Time, living in real time, is a positive herein, perhaps echoing Eliot's 
returning "recognizing
the place for the first time".......