THE GREAT PRETENDER

by James Atlas ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 1986

Benajamin Janis is a suburban Chicago teen-ager pitched like any other male into competition. Except that for Ben the competition is sheerly intellectual--smarts--and is not competition only with his oboe-playing, Levi-Strauss-reading father but with the other precocious children of his superior circle. Adolescent Ben, of course, would like to have experiences other than those of high marks and impressive lists: ""There were girls you could just look at and know they did everything. . .these girls could care less that I'd been published in Poetry magazine; they didn't give a fuck. I was about as likely to end up with one of them as with Marilyn Monroe. How did Arthur Miller do it? Maybe I should write plays."" But the other experiences largely elude him. As they do the reader. Though Ben has some friendships and family ties and romantic liaisons, Atlas never lets him graze far from an ink-horn's pasture. At Harvard, Ben studies with a thinly-disguised Robert Lowell; after graduation, he goes on scholarship to Oxford and tries to write a novel in the same room he lives in with Eleanor, his lover and herself a novelist-in-progress. As a novel, this one, with all its strivings and bookish fervor, doesn't total up to much more than an autobiographical bulletin board. Atlas neither shades nor colors nor really puts any credible dialogue into anyone's mouth other than Ben's. As a latter-day Sammy Glick (Atlas does wanly attempt to outfit Ben with some self-contempt--but it's the old story of self-criticism being the purest form of self-congratulation), Ben does have his moments. But they're few and far between in this rudimentary and inert fictionalizing.

Pub Date: May 20, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION