FORTY-SEVENTEEN

by Frank Moorhouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 1989

Australian Moorhouse offers a picaresque Beat-like saga, often in the style of an informal journal, about a man at mid-life crisis obsessed with a 17-year-old. Self-conscious and allusive, the book canters energetically and successfully over a great deal of fictional experience. After a conversation and correspondence with Philip Levine, the American poet, Sean plans a pilgrimage to Spain with his young lover to visit the landmarks of the Spanish Civil War. But in London the lover falls in love with someone else, and Sean, still in Australia, goes Bush-hopping with Belle, a self-described ""gutter slut"": ""a person who. . .seeks to be lost. . .in the full reaches of their generalised sexuality. . .sexuality in all its darkest, anonymous parts."" After exploring this idea and descending deeper into the Bush, Sean has a scare: cirrhosis of the liver that turns out to be ""the result of a heavy binge."" He stops drinking and keeps a journal on his abstinence. Then, after some fragmented narrative involving surgery and another list about being 40, he becomes a delegate to an international Atomic Energy Conference, and in Vienna meets 70-year-old Edith, who helps him scheme at the conference. Meanwhile, in London, his young ex-lover is a high-class hooker; Sean sees her briefly before going to Israel, where Edith dies. Sean then hears that his ex-wife Robyn is also dying, of cancer, and ""remarries"" her in a private mock-ceremony. Afterwards, he faces up: ""Now he was something of a drunk, a failed writer, a 'coordinator' of reports."" Finally, in New South Wales near the caves where his great-grandmother once worked as a young whore, his 17-year-old writes that she will join him so that the two of them can have a child and avoid being ""footnotes to a poem by Levine,"" This one rides its hobby-horses a little too violently, but finally shows with its droll upbeat message and suitably fragmented style.

Pub Date: June 12, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION