WATCHING THE BODY BURN

by Thomas Glynn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 1988

Memory organizes this often fragmentary narrative--an emotionally demanding account of one son's reluctant love for his ever-elusive father. Alternating between first-person and omniscience, the narrator of this incendiary fiction broods about his troubled past, a life dominated by the conflicting Protestant and Catholic sensibilities of his parents, and by the increasingly lunatic behavior of his alcoholic father. Earlier sections of the book seem like postmodern Studs Long gan, the adventures of a Chicago kid obsessed with death, violence, and his emerging sexuality. And he mislearns the facts of life in a series of often surreal set-pieces: in the audience of his favorite radio show, he discovers the difference between appearance and reality; he collects empty bottles, in hope of saving up air, in case he forgets to breathe; he witnesses the self-crucifixion of his buddy Nitny, a boy similarly fascinated with extinction. Sex means Margaret's pubescent vagina, shown for a few cents; his parents grunting in a primal scene; and an old man masturbating in the snow. On the one side of the family are the uncles, a Lutheran brood of hard-working, practical men who live their drab lives in Michigan; on the other, his frightening grandmother, ""full of Irish hatred and Catholic fury,"" a woman who could talk through her stomach, who could fly, and who collected dead birds. The boy's father, whose ""favorite trick was to imitate a sober man,"" loses job after job, defaulting on homes, buying new cars, and drinking himself into oblivion and eventual madness--an all-American failure. This dissolute dad, cruel and itinerant, imparts to his son a warped legacy--a litany of odd insights into the metaphysics of booze, the Zen of anti-fishing, and the stupidity of man and beast. The elemental nature of things frames the twisted tale--an image of the father on fire opens and closes the book--a vision of ""lightness"" that elicits the troubled son's testament of love. Something of a home-grown Kundera (without the political dimension), Glynn (The Building, 1986) blends fable and philosophy in a novel that neatly shifts from the picaresque to the apocalyptic, and yet remains grounded in a peculiarly American experience.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION