A Pilgrim’s Digression

Since last winter, I’ve read four books by Saul Bellow:

1. The Adventures of Augie March
2. Seize the Day
3. The Victim
4. Herzog

And I am in the process of reading two more, his first published novel, Dangling Man, and one of his later book of short stories, Something to Remember Me By (1991).

The latter is called a book of short stories, but it actually contains only three novellas. I would define a novella as anything over 50 pages, which fits the first two stories but not the eponymous final story, which comes in at (only) 35 pages.

Even 35 pages seems too long for a short story, but admittedly when I think of short stories, I think of Hemingway. Now that man wrote short stories.  In fact one, titled “A Very Short Story” is barely a page long but Hemingway manages to pack in a love story between an Italian woman and an American soldier in WWI. The very short story ends with the soldier returning to Chicago, ignoring his lover’s letters, and contracting gonorrhea from having sex in a taxi cab with a salesgirl in a Loop department store.

Now that is a short story and any writer who can pack that much detail into a one page story has my utmost admiration. Not that I am holding Bellow to that standard. However, in the preface to the book, he does hold himself to that standard, many times extolling the virtue of brevity–a virtue he admits he himself has not practiced.

Still, I am reading his stories anyway. The first two are done, the third awaiting my attention tonight. Something to Remember Me By, published in 1991, presents an interesting contrast to the 1944 novel Dangling Man I am also reading.

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After finishing up with Augie March last week, I began reading another Bellow book, The Victim. Though Bellow wrote it before his purported masterpiece, I actually consider The Victim to be the better book. It has a lot of the qualities I’ve come to value in a novel: conciseness, a realistic portrayal of characters–their language, interactions, psychology–and some philosophical depth, but not an over-powering avant garde flavor.

What it reminds me most of are the short novels of Kafka and Camus, two of my favorite writers. The plot is simple: Leventhal, a copy editor at a small trade magazine in New York, is stalked by a man he barely remembers, but who claims that Leventhal did him some great harm long ago. As the story unfolds, it becomes difficult to say whether the stalker is right or wrong.

Leventhal has his own grievances, not just about the man harassing him, but about the anti-semitism he seems to detect in the people with whom he works and associates himself. Again, it’s difficult to tell to what degree his suspicions are justified. Leventhal himself, whose mother supposedly died in an insane asylum, sometimes wonders if he is not suffering from paranoia.

The novel is wonderfully ambiguous on just about every point. Who is the victim? Is Leventhal going insane? Maybe the “victim,” Allbee, has a point and Leventhal did ruin his life. There is even a certain ambiguity in Leventhal’s personal story. He has always accepted his father’s account of what happened to his mother–that she went insane and had to be committed, and later she died in the hospital. Leventhal’s wife, Mary (who is away visiting family for the entire novel), has suggested to Leventhal that maybe he shouldn’t accept his father’s account of the event at face value.

I think it’s a bit simplistic to take the novel at face value, as well. It isn’t just the story of a man compelled to self-examination by the sudden appearance of someone he wronged long ago. My impression, especially with the anti-semitism angle so prominent, is that Bellow is examining the ways in which every one of us hurt each other, sometimes unconsciously, and the way that hurt gets spread around through our often careless interactions. Not to go all bleeding heart, but in some ways we are all the victim.

My reading lately has taken me into some odd places. I’ve been steadfastly working through Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, despite the distinct feeling I will remember very little about it once I’ve finished it.

It’s a novel from another era, when a writer could pass off yet another bloated tale of a young man’s coming of age as a contender for the GAM (Great American Novel). Yet I still enjoy such novels, if only because I, too, am a young man coming of age. Ahem. Yes, seriously.

But my interest has really been piqued by this old book I discovered in the library, after hearing it mentioned by N., a friend.

The Mask of Sanity, by Hervey Cleckley. N. read the book as part of an introductory psychology course in the sixties, and she has referred often enough to it in conversation that I thought it worth checking out.

I don’t believe there is a more recent edition than 1976, and that edition was a fifth edition, the original having been published around 1940. It should here be noted that Cleckley is also the co-author of The Three Faces of Eve.

What makes The Mask of Sanity interesting is that Cleckley starts from the premise that people who pass as “sane” in our society, but who nonetheless demonstrate non-adaptive and anti-social behavior, are perhaps more interesting than the lunatic. Modern psychiatry knows what to do with a lunatic–permanent hospitalization is in order–but for the sociopath who is otherwise what we would call “high-functioning,” what is to be done?

As always with books on human psychology, the best parts are the case histories. Clekley’s presentation is as interesting for its candor about the subjects’ sexual history as it is humorous–a true rarity among psychologists. Take the following example. Writing of a millionaire who had spent his money irrationally, Cleckley writes:

For months he had maintained 138 bird dogs scattered over the countryside, forty-two horses, and fourteen women, to none of whom he resorted for the several types of pleasure in which such dependents sometimes play a part.

I don’t think Cleckley could have anticipated that far from being considered irrational or a sign of mental defect, in our era, pointless squandering of wealth in conspicuous consumption is actually celebrated.

Take another example of, perhaps in this case, unintentional humor. Describing the aberrant sexual history of a female patient, Cleckley writes:

Occasionally during her early thirties, but also a few times since, Anna had engaged in a pastime know as gangbanging…Usually drinks with five or six men , whom she might pick up in one of the less inviting honky-tonks or frolic spots about town, constituted the first phase. Later the group rode out into the country and all her companions had sexual relations with her, each taking his turn.

“Frolic spot?” The phrase leaves me wondering what he meant. I imagine playful youths celebrating the pleasures of Bacchus in a willow grove. And it was quite gentlemanly of the men to at least take turns, I think.

Anyway, again humor arises from the juxtaposing of low and high–the term “gangbanging” with a more or less clinical description of the act. As a dangerous compulsion (Anna was beaten up and thrown in a river during one of these gangbangs), her behavior is worthy of clinical analysis, but I’m not sure that even today Anna would find any help from a therapist unless she herself asked.

In 1940, it would have been Anna’s parents or husband who sought help for her, usually in the form of involuntary commitment.

Perhaps far more interesting from the modern perspective is that such case histories remove the rose colored glasses with which we often view the past. If asked, most people would probably say the term, if not the concept, of a gangbang, originated in the nineteen-sixties rather than the nineteen-thirties.

I’m of the opinion that whatever depravity we practice today was probably not unknown to our ancestors.

The Mask of Sanity is a fascinating book, and worth a read, if you can find a copy. The essential problem–what can be done to help the neurotic who cannot be committed, but has difficulty functioning within the bounds of society–remains relevant to our time.

On Tuesday, I finished reading Philip Roth’s novel When She Was Good and began reading Richard Yates’s novel A Good School. I’m not going to write the Comp 101 equivalent of a comparison/contrast essay; however, I do think Yates and Roth make a rather complementary pair. The strength of both writers is their ability to portray characters of psychologically depth with whom we come to sympathize.

When She Was Good is an ironically titled ironic novel, in which the main character, Lucy Nelson, is a woman who is so good, she’s bad. By the end of the novel, although I still sympathized with Lucy, I found myself far more sympathetic to the “bad” people who could never live up to her high moral standards. Her alcoholic father, her weak and mincing mother and grandfather, her browbeaten husband Roy, and Roy’s philandering Uncle Julian…all come far short of living up to Lucy’s expectations, but somehow that makes me even more sympathetic with them. Lucy is a “ball buster” in Uncle Julian’s words, and that is not an attractive characteristic in any person.

Still, especially after reading the tragic ending of the novel (which seemed a bit forced), I couldn’t help but feel that maybe in this novel, Roth was taking a small measure of revenge against some ball buster in his real life. He seemed to revel a bit too much in Lucy’s pathetic demise.

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Every once in awhile, I discover a writer I’ve never heard of, but whose first words I read seem to be aimed directly at me.  Richard Yates is one of those writers.  When I read the first chapter of his novel Revolutionary Road, it was both striking and frightening how deadly accurate Yates could be in capturing something as singular and volatile as a marital spat.  “Yes!”  I said, “This is how men and women fight.  No one’s ever got it right, but Yates did it!”  As Hemingway might put it, cryptically, true words are what separate a great writer from a merely good writer.

I’ve encountered other moments of truth in the months since reading those first pages of Yates’s best novel.  I can’t think of many writers who write in such un-stylized prose, yet who can so truthfully capture the people we all know.

My own discovery of Yates happened in a fairly typical way.  Sam Mendes decided to make a movie based on Revolutionary Road, and I happened to read a New York Times article about the film.  The journalist mentioned something about Yates being a forgotten novelist of the 20th century, and that was probably what sent me to the library catalog to find the novel.  I still haven’t seen the movie, but the book is one of my favorites, now.

I’m a sucker for “forgotten” writers.  However, if you read the Popular Culture citations in his Wikipedia article, you might agree with me that an author who is cited in a Woody Allen movie probably wasn’t so forgotten after all.

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When a journalist tries to pack too much information into a sentence, it can leave the reader feeling as if he or she has fallen into an overstuffed armchair.  It’s difficult to get out, once you’re in.

I get impatient with sentences that are too long, or that try to tell me too much at once.  As an example, take the following sentence in the Washington Post’s obituary for John Updike, written by Matt Schudel.

John Updike, whose finely polished novels and stories exploring the virtues, vices and spent hopes of America’s small towns and suburbs earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and kept him at the pinnacle of the nation’s literary life for five decades, died yesterday at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

If you’re a reader like me, you didn’t even read the part between the commas.    You can’t even speak the sentence all in one breath.  There has to be a gasp for air in there somewhere.

I know journalists write within defined word limits, but do they have to add every single relevant detail to the first sentence?  From what little I know about the subject, the first sentence in a news story is called the lede, and it should set up the story to come accurately and precisely.

Yet somehow, I think a lede ought to be considered a failure if readers skip the content in order to get to the end.  “John Updike died yesterday at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.”  That’s what most of us read–the rest of it, we skim.  “Pulitzer Prize”  blah blah blah…”finely polished novels” blah blah blah…

John Updike is dead.  There’s your lede.

It seems ironic, too, that what I would consider a bad sentence leads a story about the death of a man who, the journalist himself says, “may be the finest prose stylist of his generation.”

Myself, I was never able to enjoy an Updike novel.  I read that his books were rife with sex, but I could never read far enough in any one of them to get to those good parts.

Maybe I will give him another chance, now that I’m a little older.  Really, beyond the sex, there wasn’t much about Updike that would appeal to young people.  He really didn’t write about young people and their angst.  Middle age angst was more his subject, so Updike may be more to my liking today.  If any of my readers can suggest a place to begin reading him, I will gladly take suggestions.

I always feel cheated when I begin reading a book, only to discover it is an abridgment.

If I am considering whether to buy a book at the bookstore, and then I read on the cover “Abridged Edition,” I put the book back on the rack feeling something like disgust.

A couple weeks ago, after finishing Camus’ The Fall, I checked out the most recent biography of the writer from the library. Albert Camus: A Life, by Olivier Todd, translated from French by Benjamin Ivry. I began reading the preface, and discovered that the author had decided to abridge his biography, leaving out certain parts that he believed would not be of interest to American readers.

I think anticipation of a stupid audience is perhaps the most frustrating reason I’ve come across for an abridgment. If I am sufficiently educated to know about Albert Camus, as well as read his work; and if I then demonstrate enough perspicacity to go even further and check out Camus’ biography from the library, why should the author of that biography presume I am an imbecile and not sufficiently cosmopolitan enough to take an interest in specifically French elements of Camus’ life?

I am reading the biography anyway. Perhaps there are other, complete biographies available in English, but this one will do for now. Still, I have never come across a scholarly biography in which the author presumes his readers really don’t want to read every sentence that he wrote.

Most often, however, I come across works that were abridged, not with the author’s permission, but by an over-scrupulous editor who presumes not only what a hypothetical audience wants to read, but what the deceased or incapacitated author would want this hypothetical audience to read.

After reading that Camus was a great admirer of Kafka, of whom I am also enamored, I picked up my Schocken Classics edition of Kafka’s diaries. I have had this book for years, dipping into it occasionally. I like the heavy bond paper of the cover; it feels almost like brown paper. And I like the font used for the title and other elements of the cover and binding. A book is all of a piece, you know, and I often find myself most dedicated to books that look and feel a certain way, as much as books with words that have great meaning for me. The Kafka diaries were both: a good looking book with words inside that meant a lot to me Like most such works, however, the diaries do not lend themselves to reading straight through, so I never made a dedicated reading of it. Thus I never read the postscript.

In reading the book, I came across the following fragment of a sentence, “The seamstresses in the downpour of rain.” There was a superscript numeral 2 at the end of the sentence, indicating an End Note. So I went looking for it, and instead found a “Postscript.” Upon reading it, I was disappointed to discover that this book I have owned for years–indeed, this book I regarded as a treasure among my books–is in fact an abridged edition.

The editor, Max Brod (the friend and literary executor of Kafka), had taken it upon himself to decide what Kafka would have wanted published, and what he would have rather kept secret. And yet he writes, “The text of the Diaries is as complete as it was possible to make it.” Oh really?

“A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature, are omitted. In most instances no more than a few words are involved. In several (rare) cases I omitted things that were too intimate, as well as scathing criticism of various people that Kafka certainly never intended for the public.”

In other words, he took the red pencil to all the good parts.

That is perhaps too harsh. Yet I find such editorial decisions more than a bit annoying. It is likely that Kafka intended that none of his diaries ever be published. Therefore, to single out certain bits as especially unfitting for publication due to some perceived authorial intention is a bit disingenuous. The editor makes his excisions for his own reasons, then blames the author for his own rather prudish judgment.

It is not merely that we live in an age where the “intimate” details of a person’s life are no longer expected to be kept private, but that when we pick up a biography or watch a profile of a person on the news, we expect to be given the whole package, nothing left out.

One of the reasons I picked up the most recent biography of Camus was because one expects that more recent versions will not spare us from the unsavory parts of the writer’s life, if there are unsavory parts. If I picked up a biography of a favorite poet of mine, Philip Larkin, only to read on the book jacket that the author had censored the bits about Larkin’s penchant for looking at pornography, I would toss the book down in annoyance.

Give me the story of the whole person, as best you can, or give me nothing at all.

To tell us that there are “intimate” parts you are leaving out only whets the appetite and results in an imagination gone wild. On one page of Kafka’s diaries, he writes the sentence, “I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.”

Was this all he wrote on the subject? It is certainly all that Brod chose to publish, thus we have to decide whether or not Brod censored something he deemed improper. I do not want to read a book perpetually in doubt about the honesty of the words before me.

Nor at this point do I wish to debate with these modern adherents of dry scholasticism in our Universities who write criticism on the subject of whether there is ever anything “honest” about the words a writer puts on paper, much as their ancestors asked how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. Yes, all words are but a simulacrum, not to be trusted. I’d just like to know whether Kafka frequented brothels, and if so what he thought and felt about it, insofar as he put those thoughts and feelings on paper. That is all.

Perhaps even if Kafka did indicate that he was a patron of brothels, that would be a lie. I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. That is not the kind of honesty I am interested in. I want the author’s words, unfiltered through the medium of a scrupulous editor like Brod, or a condescending biographer like Olivier Todd. Let me make up my own mind about such things.

I don’t mean to reduce the argument to a matter of Catholicism versus Protestantism, yet that is essentially what it comes down to: do we readers need someone to interpret the text for us, to the point of deciding what we will read and what we mustn’t read? Do we need someone to intercede on our behalf to the author? Or do we read for ourselves and make our own judgment?

Before they die, authors ought to make arrangements for the proper dispensation of their works, much as they make arrangements for the interment or cremation of their body. Authors who make no such arrangement are like the atheist who, leaving no will, ends up on display in a church, prior to burial in hallowed ground.

But then once dead, we all make what we will of the deceased and his remains, don’t we? So often we see the corpse in the coffin and think, or even say aloud, “That looks nothing like him.” The corpse has been made up to look more alive than in life; yet it usually seems even more waxen and dead. Thus, perhaps there is nothing to be done about editorial embalming after an author is dead. It’s just the way of the world.

And perhaps I am wrong to feel cheated, when I read that an author’s diaries have been edited a little too closely for my taste, or that some parts have been left out of his biography. Yet I can’t help but feel that way. Sometimes I think that my taste did not mature enough in the halls of academia to truly understand these matters. I still read with a child-like mentality.

I can even remember when I was a child, my maternal grandmother subscribed to the Reader’s Digest and would regularly receive boxes of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, as they were called. I read some of them, until I learned what “condensed” meant. Even at a young age, I felt abused that some abstract editor at the Digest made the decision to give me only so much as he or she felt I needed to know.

So even today, I often find myself looking first thing for some sign that a book has been edited or abridged or condensed. It is perhaps a pointless habit, but reassuring myself that I am not reading someone else’s version of the writer’s work, that these are the writer’s words and only the writer’s words, at least puts my mind at ease. Reading is for me a communion with an unseen, unknown authorial deity. I want to know what that author wrote, not what some priestly scribe in a University or publisher’s office thinks the author would want me to know.

The past two or three weeks, I’ve been reading The Fall by Albert Camus. The book is quite short, not even 150 pages, so it makes ideal reading for the half hour or so I spend commuting on the train, weekday mornings. It has also served to remind me what I once appreciated about this author, whose novel The Stranger I read, probably while I was still in high school: brevity, wit, and a pungent ability to speak painful truth.

I do not mean this post to be a critical appraisal of The Fall, however. Such a thing is beyond me, at this stage in life. I merely mean to give an overview of the book and express what I appreciate about it.

The book is, on the surface, about two men who meet in a bar in Amsterdam. The story, such as there is one, is told in first person monologue by one of the men, Clamence.

Whether or not Camus intended it, the name Clamence suggests to me the French American word, “commence,” and indeed I do think we are supposed to view Clamence as a sort of prototypical human. In that regard, Camus portrays us all as pretty vile creatures. But that should come as no surprise, given Camus’ other works.

Clamence is a judge, or “judge penitent” as he calls himself, presumably meaning that he feels some regret about his status as a judge of men. “Judge” does not seem to indicate the same thing it means to Americans, however; the book suggests that in France, it must mean something closer to what we would call a “defense lawyer.”

Yet though his social position is quite high, and he is viewed by other people as the moral arbiter his profession would suggest, in reality his life is despicable. The central event in the novel gives just a taste of the man’s selfishness: while walking along the quais of Paris one evening, he passes a young woman standing on a bridge and looking down at the water. He passes by, and as he does so, he hears a splash and a scream behind him. He turns, considers diving in after her, but decides the water would be too cold. And so he walks on.

The scene reverberates as if the water of the Seine were still rippling outward from the young woman’s suicide, until the very end of the novel. In the final sentences, Clamence remarks that sometimes he wishes for another chance to save her:

A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose…that we should be taken literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr…! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

Inasmuch as the title both represents the girl falling into the river, and the Fall (of Man), we are all Clamence, choosing selfishness over selflessness, even when selflessness would cost us little (a cold, wet dip in the river), but save another’s life. The odd “fortunately!” with which the novel ends suggests to me, perhaps incorrectly (but certainly ironically), an old idea that sticks in my head from my reading of John Milton long ago: the concept of “the fortunate fall.” The fall of Man was “fortunate” because it brought about the greater good of his salvation.

In the case of Clamence, the concept is turned on its head. What possible greater good could come from Clamence NOT saving the girl’s life? The only possible answer is that he stands as an “exemplar” as he says, a negative portrait of humankind for us to avoid. However, I don’t think Camus is quite so patronizing as to suggest that his character is to be viewed as a counter-instructional model.

But as I said, this is not a critical appraisal of the novel. Suffice it to say that Clamence lives in a state of debauchery, vice, and crime, as do many of his clients, yet he gives the impression of uprightness. He comments that he “never accepted a sou” for the defense of a poor person. It was that sense of being better than, what he calls “being above” people that most defines his character. He was charitable not for charity’s sake, but for the way it increased his virtue in his own eyes and in the opinion of onlookers.

Although he might disclaim it, he clearly feels overwhelming guilt, but not being a believer he has no way to absolve himself of his sins. That lack of hope for salvation is the quintessential existentialist predicament.

The novel is ripe with witty aphorisms and anecdotes. Indeed sometimes it reads almost as a collection of such bright baubles, rather than as a novel with a tightly woven plot. Allow me to share just a few of my favorites.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. [6]

To bring that up to date for modern readers, I’d change it to “he fornicated and read the blogs.” Another quote:

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur. [41]

And another, one that I do not believe we are supposed to take as “truth,” but does illustrate the character of Clamence:

Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing–you agree with me?…The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.

And an example of an anecdote which does have the painful ring of truth about it.

“You’ll pay for this!” a daughter said to her father who had prevented her from marrying a too well groomed suitor. And she killed herself. But the father paid for nothing. He loved fly-casting. Three Sundays later he went back to the river—to forget, as he said. He was right; he forgot.

This compact, pithy little book is filled with examples such as I quoted above. It’s well worth a read, and I daresay someone with the ability to read faster than myself should make short work of it in an hour or two. It begs re-reading, though, which is sort of what I have been doing here, in this blog post. Now, I need to fornicate and read my blogs.

I began this post Thanksgiving Day, but found no time to finish it. We had a busy week, with my wife’s family visiting from Wednesday through Sunday, and plenty of cooking, eating, going to the movies, playing cards, and decorating for Christmas to keep us fully occupied. It was a good holiday.

The only real negativity that crept into the holiday occurred early on, before the family arrived. I was feeling extremely grouchy at the intensity of my wife’s preparations. Tuesday and Wednesday, I especially felt harried and nagged, and unable to find even a half-hour to myself. I remember Thursday morning, I got up early thinking that no one else would be awake and I could have maybe an hour to myself to play World of Warcraft. I made the coffee and then took the dog out for a pee, and by the time I came back in Lynn was up, preparing the turkey and asking for my help.

In retrospect, I had no right to be resentful, though. It was a good Thanksgiving, and it was good because my wife and her sister made it a good one. I can be intensely anti-social, even misanthropic, not to mention plain old lazy…and then I act as if it is other people’s fault when I am not enjoying myself.

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I just finished reading a novel by Justin Evans, titled A Good and Happy Child, and I thought it might be worthwhile to offer a few thoughts on the book. I picked it up at Borders several weeks ago, after reading a few pages and deciding that the fictional town of Preston, Virginia, was probably based on a town I know very well, Lexington, Virginia. Preston even has a store that sells fireworks and lawn ornaments and advertises “The largest rattle snake in the south.” Lynn and I have seen that snake. It is a big one, though it is now just a dried carcass hanging over the door of the store.

Until today, I did not realize that Evans has a website, where my suspicion about the Preston/Lexington connection is confirmed.

In terms of plot, the book is quite engaging. It’s the story of a young boy, George Davies, who believes he has become possessed by a demon, following his father’s death. Like the really good horror stories one reads, from Poe’s Doppelgangers to Stephen King’s “dull boy,” Jack Torrance, the heart of the horror is human madness. And like all truly good writers, Evans leaves the central question—is the hero mad or really possessed by a demon?— completely ambiguous right to the end. That may mean that this book is not for everyone. Even I found the ending a little abrupt and unsatisfactory, following as it does a climactic revelation.

Is George possessed by a demon? The question is almost irrelevant, because schizophrenia and demonic possession have so many of the same symptoms. The reader can make up his or her own mind, though I think near the end, Evans gives a pretty strong hint about the truth. I can’t say more than that without revealing too much. But keep in mind, this is the kind of book you have to think about in order to fully digest the content and come to some conclusion. If you read a book and expect the author to neatly tie things up in the end, revealing that the boy was crazy all along, this book will disappoint you.

Really, I can think of only a handful of criticisms of the book. Characterization of George’s mother, a central figure in the book, seems rather weak. I only have a vague impression of her and her motivations. The mother seems to be motivated by an almost clichéd liberalism, which is used to explain everything from her doubts about religion to her sex life.

Also, considering her staunch refusal to believe in George’s “Friend,” her sudden submission to a blessing ceremony for George (related in a flashback rather than in real-time narrative), seems uncharacteristic and forced. However, from a technical standpoint, I understand the reason behind it.

The novel is narrated by an adult George talking to his psychologist, but the majority of the narrative is actually set in the early eighties when George was a child, and it is at that time where the true climax of the book occurs. However, that does nothing to resolve the issue of why George, the adult, has found his way to a therapist’s office once again. In order to move the character from the climactic moment in the eighties to the climactic moment in the present without a lot of extra chapters, Evans introduces the “special blessing” that George’s mother consents to, and which seems to drive the demon into hiding for the intervening twenty-odd years.

Again, it seems sort of like a writer’s “Oh crap” button, as in “Oh crap, I painted myself into this corner, now how do I get out.”

Those criticisms aside, I enjoyed the book and hope Evans writes another. I am likely to read it, if he does.