Despite his insight and lyricism, Stadler (The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, 1993, etc.) can't keep this overambitious commentary on sex and the state from falling flat. At some time not far from now, in a town that could be anywhere, a male teacher is apprehended for making love with a 12-year-old boy. But one of the doctors evaluating his case, Doctor-General Nicholas Nicholas, is so moved by the beautiful descriptions in the teacher's unrepentant essays that he pursues an unusual path of rehabilitation whereby the teacher takes on a new identity in a new city. Mr. uh, uh, as the teacher comes to be called to protect his anonymity (``It's a hesitation, a failure to say a name''), becomes a writer who never writes, stays away from little boys, and tries to discover his ``place in the social scheme...the right relation of love and...politics.'' To make things clearer, his rehabilitators offer therapy sessions in which the Doctor-General and Mr. uh, uh undress and put paper bags on their heads (so they can be fully revealed yet never see each other); there are also conditioning sessions in which Mr. uh, uh watches pedophilic porno films accompanied by electric shock and noxious gases while trying not to foul the ``phallometer.'' (This proves difficult since Mr. uh, uh has decided that pain and passion are inextricably linked.) Mr. uh, uh takes on another identity as Mr. Sludge after he's recruited by a group of artisans who modify the faces of politicians. Stadler's tale is complicated, and the themes are sophisticated. He's clearly riffing off Nabokov, but this novel lacks the structural brilliance required to maintain control of the complex layers of identity and meaning. Intelligent, strange, and often beautiful. Not quite impotent, but less than satisfying.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017107-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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