BILGEWATER

by Jane Gardam ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 1977

Poor Bilgewater, convinced that she's slow and lumpy and looks like a toad, terrified to the point of flight by the simplest social interaction, associating only with the housekeeper, her abstracted scholarly father, and his ancient colleagues at the boys' school where they live--poor Bilgewater (even her name is a joke, perpetrated by the boarders) is a living illustration of the Disraeli Quotation--""Youth is a blunder""--that prefaces her first-person story. The reminiscence starts off as slow and uneventful as her life at the school, with awful Tom Terrapin calling her a Peeping Tom from his window on the ""boys' side"" and popular head boy Jack Rose flattering her with the loan of Ulysses constituting the most memorable moments of her early teens. But it builds into an almost surrealistic confluence of encounters, involving the same boys, with Bilge at seventeen climbing in and out of windows, buses, and beds in a panicky but ambivalent attempt to escape uncomfortable contacts. The same sort of distraction, dislocation, and impetuous flight marked The Summer After the Funeral (1973), but compared to Summer. . .'s Athene, rueful, ironic Bilge takes herself--well, not less seriously perhaps but with something of an outsider's perspective. (""Beware of self-pity,"" the housekeeper's motto, could be hers as well.) At once detached and painfully self-preoccupied, Bilgewater has a sharp inner eye that is equally cool and observant whether it is turned inward or out onto the variously flawed and dotty Britishers of her constricted world.

Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Greenwillow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION