VIBRATIONS

by George A. Woods ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1970

If sometime again you met a stranger who talked on into the night, it might be this boy sorting out the past, confessing ""I never had much luck with girls,"" ""I was always the last one picked when the guys chose up sides,"" and worse -- ""Sometimes I think I've never done anything good for anyone in my life."" But always with longing -- ""Corky was my hero, the big brother I never had""; uneasy apology -- ""I know it sounds kind of ghoulish (to fool around at the undertaker's) but Mel and all of us were respectful all the time""; and an undercurrent of love -- most memorably for the rabbit that Corky's father's hound killed, that Corky just ignored. As the cynosure who, being oblivious, is cruel, Corky looms large but remains impalpable, collapsing under the weight placed on him and his death. (At the Gulf of Tonkin -- a few years after steam railroads? Throughout, in less tangible ways, the present and the past coexist uncomfortably.) A sudden discovery that his mother is his stepmother, being neither prefigured nor followed-up, seems a gratuitous jolt; but it is when the ominous anxiety at the outset resolves finally into disquietude about his father's death that one feels most cheated. This not only because his father's death is known but more importantly because the stories about his father, among the best of several good stories, convey as much warmth and appreciation as betrayal and disillusion: there is no call for the boy to prostrate himself -- and unburden himself -- with a belated ""I loved you."" Elsewhere it is a more authentic voice, and when it tells of stripping balsam trees to stuff pillows (""what was I going to say to my father, that I refuse to go because it violates my conservation principles?"") or ignominiously hawking candy on a train, the suffering is at once immediate and hilarious. The whole is not only less than the sum of its parts, it is least successful the more it solicits sympathy or broadcasts a message.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION