Word: caulfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Which of these opposing spirits-Hammer or Nailles-will decide the fate of Nailles' adolescent son Tony? Before the answer is given, Tony is sketched by Cheever as a gentle but largely predictable symbol of his generation. Unlike Salinger's Holden Caulfield, with his torrential garrulity, the boy does not get to tell his own story. But his silent vote is profoundly disapproving of Bullet Park and its frangible felicities. He has few dramatically contemporary hang-ups. There is little pot, porn, trans-sex, unisex in Tony's scene...
Roth's use of the psychoanalytic confession makes for a most interesting form of characterization. Instead of delineating character, Portnoy recreates monsters. When Holden Caulfield told it all to a psychiatrist in Catcher in the Rye, it was really just a narrative device, just an excuse for the telling of a story. In the case of Portnoy, we never forget that he is lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror...
...psychoanalyst five days a week, no doubt to discuss his anxieties about the impending 1040. The sight of Farrow and Dustin salting down the scratch, the former looking like a sand-kicked 97-lb. weakling in Rosemary's Baby and the latter as a watered-down Holden Caulfield in The Graduate, is enough to confirm to this aging mind that when eccentricity and grotesquerie become the prime movers of modern society and grace the cover of society's most powerful conscience, the Flat Earth Society might have something...
...DREAM WATCHER by Barbara Wersba (Atheneum, $3.95). Albert is a misfit-he reads Thoreau, enjoys gardening, and is always worried about his "crummy soul." As a mini-Holden Caulfield he is as real...
...monster of Expensive People is a gross 18-year-old named Richard Everett with an IQ of 161 and a neurosis to match every one of his 250 pounds. In a memoir that sometimes reads like Compulsion as told by Holden Caulfield, Richard wanders through his traumatic childhood, concentrating upon his twelfth year when he blossomed out as a child murderer...