And Wind Will Wash Away

Ten years after its first appearance, And Wind Will Wash Away deserves to be read as precisely this kind of hybrid creature: detective novel, Atlanta novel, religious novel, philosophical inquiry, erotic lament, and metaphysical joke played upon a man who believes the universe is stuffed with explanations. Rothacker's strange, absorbing novel is, in my mind, more necessary today that it was in 2016. We have become a culture practically stuffed to our gullets with information while starving for certainty. We carry devices capable of answering almost any question, yet we find ourselves increasingly uncertain about what constitutes a fact...

The fundamental mysteries remain, the important questions go unanswered. Why do people love whom they love? Why do people believe what they believe? Why do prejudices not only persist, but blossom as rampantly as hothouse flowers? When does life begin, and when does it end? What is a coincidence? What is synchronicity? Where does reason end and faith begin? And perhaps most troubling, how much of the person sleeping beside you is everlastingly unknowable?

These are Jonathan Wind's questions, although for much of the novel he does not know that he is asking them, and he doesn't get to them right away.

He believes, at first, he is asking a much simpler question:

What happened to Flora Ross?

From the Foreword by Reginald McKnight