MEMOIRS OF A DANCE-HALL ROMEO

by Jack Higgins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1989

A charming, seriocomic sexual coming-of-age tale, circa 1949, that's far from Higgins' usual breakneck thrillers (A Season in Hell, etc.) but close to his heart: this is confessedly autobiographical work. Higgins' alter ego here is narrator Oliver Shaw, a 20-year-old soldier Who, upon demobilization, decides ""to devote myself exclusively to the pursuit of women."" That Oliver/ Jack has much to learn becomes clear in his first encounter--a pickup on a bus near his home town of Manningham that ends with his ejaculating prematurely and running for advice to a more sophisticated pal who explains that ""women like to experience the big bang too, you know."" So Oliver sets about sharing the ecstasy in a series of enthusiastic encounters with several women, most met at the splendidly evoked ""Moorish palace"" of a local dance hall, the Trocadero. There are: elegant Helen, an older woman with whom Oliver has his first real romance until he spies her with her husband; statuesque Imogene, who leads Oliver into an erotic underwater escapade; nymphomaniacal Lucy, from whom he escapes in terror; black-garbed Olive, enamored of S&M; and cool nurse Harriet, called upon to tend Oliver's testicles after they're crunched by one of the hoodlums at the school where he teaches. It's his hard survival of a year of that teaching--general subjects--to the tough slum kids at a grim local school that gives Oliver's story a gloss of social relevance; and it's his ambitious fiction-writing, which he squeezes into every spare second between sex and school, that finally gives him a ticket into a new life as he graduates from the year a better but no wiser lover, but with a novel sold and fame and fortune glimmering on the horizon. Thriller writers who call timeout to wax nostalgic are legion--e.g., Stephen King in Different Seasons and Robert B. Parker in Love and Glory--and Higgins does the tradition fair justice with his warmly lit albeit sexually explicit and bumpily episodic tale.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION