AT THE SHORES

by Thomas Rogers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 1980

The dampered prose of this novel is kept so plain--its progress is so gently graded--that you are likely to discover yourself halfway through it before beginning to sense what a lovely work it is. And this deceptive quality is also heightened by the universality of Rogers' subject here: adolescent desire. Jerry Engles spends his teenage summers during the late Thirties at Indiana Shores, a beach community on southern Lake Michigan populated mostly with Chicago-based upper-echelon personnel of Standard Oil like Jerry's father. Jerry likes girls, always has; he can talk about them with disarming candor with his older sister Anne (an excitement itself, sub-surface, for them both), but he's finally dumbfounded about how to best utilize or even aim his turmoiled young body. The cathouses in Michigan City--and the ""catwomen"" therein--are investigated tentatively, but Jerry is a lover by nature and not truly mollified unless in love. That comes in the person of Rosalind Ingleside, one of his classmates at the U. of Chicago high school and a summer beach neighbor. She brings out the certain wild unpredictableness stranded under Jerry's All-American-boy lineaments: one night he breaks into the Inglesides' not-yet-opened Shores house, enters Rosalind's room, smells her bathing suit, even finds himself negligently chewing on one of her sandals. And perhaps this wildness comes across to the richer (yet plainer) Rosalind as an attraction in and of itself: he and she become lovers. Actual sex fascinates Jerry, the way its power controls him even afterwards, lending him a delicious deliberation and a confidence he's never known before. But to Rosalind each dune-sheltered tryst is a bad lapse of judgment, an ordeal in retrospect; to disengage, she finally tells her parents: end of affair. So Jerry, in grief, finds himself one night walking into the lake with his clothes on--a drowning-attempt scene that caps a dozen others in which Rogers (The Confessions of a Child of the Century)has Jerry knotting with horniness and puzzlement, then suddenly becoming absorbed with what's right before him (a bush full of ripe blueberries, for instance). True, Jerry's ache is an archetype. But the humor, the weaving, and the way ""the Shores"" seems like a backdrop (a quite beautiful one but still, as always with adolescents, barely registered except by immediate sense) all give the book a subtle authority. Fine, satisfying, emotionally authentic work.

Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1980

ISBN: 1590511506

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION