MY FATHER'S ORCHARD

This very slight mood piece describes ""poetically"" a psychic crisis in a seventeen year old boy. The boy is in conflict with his father. He has been taken of school, for a reason never given. He wanders about, talks with his kid sister, gives up the girl who loves him, sleeps with another as idle but more knowing than he is, shoots a pheasant, and, at the end, returns daunted and grateful to his father.... The style is dreamy, the story inconclusive, and the author apparently incapable of seeing or unwilling to state fully the ambiguities implied. For what the vague ""poetic"" language conceals or propounds as love and acceptance appears mainly to be a frightened retreat from love, death and growing up.