Customer Reviews

The Child: A Novel

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Stewie Mulcahey is a shy and troubled 15 year old gay boy from a dysfunctional home, who finds his only acceptance and comfort in the arms of David, a 39 year old man he met through an internet chat room. When his parents find out, Stewie is coerced by the police into testifying against the adult, although the boy insists he always initiated their contacts and was not forced into anything. His home life deteriorates further, with his parents and sister making it clear they want him out of the house, and they become upset when a social worker refuses to send him to a juvenile detention home. The situation escallates until an episode in which he is charged as an adult with murder in the death of his young nephew, whom they suspected him of molesting.



One of the two attorneys for David, the adult charged in the molestation, is Eva Krasner, who is simultaneously going through some tough times with his lover, Mary, and facing a possible health crisis. She is working with gay attorney Hockey Notkin, who seems a bit bitter and distracted since losing his lover to AIDS. They struggle with the dilemma of creating a defense for David without simultaneously pushing more of the blame on Stewie who, while he is not their client, they feel is more of a victim of his family's and the justice system's homophobia than anything else.



Sarah Schulman is a well-known lesbian writer who has a reputation for edgy works, and this is no exception. She tackles a difficult and controversial subject head on, but with a skillfully light touch that doesn't prejudge or challenge the opinions of the reader. The novel reads like a crime mystery, and catches the readers attention every step of the way.

The 'child' of the (ironic) title is Stew, a typical, lonely, 15 year old gay male living with his self-involved parents. He meets a gay male couple though the internet and starts building a full relationship (including sexual elements) with them. For a brief moment he believes that he has found happiness and acceptance - perhaps life is worth living after all? On the way back from a visit with them, he is the subject of a entrapment scene is a public toilet; arrested, he is taken to a police station whereupon he is manipulated into revealing where he had been. The gay couple are arrested on charges of 'child abuse', and Stew's nightmare begins:

"He was surrounded by walls, his family, the police. No one was flexible. No one had a reasonable explanation for their behavior, and no one had to."

A variety of characters and sub-plots populate this novel, with particular precedence given to Eva, a lesbian woman and a lawyer, who becomes involved in defending one of the partners in the gay couple detained on 'child abuse' charges. Indeed, the novel focuses not so much on the subsequent legal processes, but rather on the background cast of characters involved: Eva; her relationship with her partner Mary; Stew's family; the social worker assigned to Stew; and Hockey, an HIV+ lawyer working alongside Eva. This broader perspective enables the author to capture her primary theme: exposing the delusions that individuals create in order to satisfy their own egoistic desires.

Consequently, the various characters' façades are stripped away, and the author presents a myriad of iconoclastic images: the child who is not merely 'a child' but a human, with rights and desires; the parents whose 'love' for their child is instead a need to propagate their own sense of self-worth; the child welfare infrastructure that does not genuinely care about the child; the lesbian social activist who desires love more than a successful outcome; the law enforcement officers whose hatred of their perceived enemy far eclipses any professed concern for the child's well-being; the HIV+ lawyer who is unsympathetic to any hint of weakness in others; the judicial system that allows a young male to bear criminal responsibility for his actions but denies him the right to love freely.

Clearly this perspective will be unsettling to readers unused to confronting the darker reality of life. Nevertheless - and indeed, for this reason - the novel deserves the broadest possible audience. 'The Child' is an important work; as with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', it is concerned to challenge the cozy self/group delusions that mainstream society most desires to cherish - and accordingly serves as a courageous assertion of independent writing, which is all-too-often suppressed in favor of promulgating society's false idealism. Sarah Schulman's novel is written with fluid, fearless originality, and is highly recommended.

If you know who Procrustes was, and what "procrustean" means, then you'll be at home in this book. That mythical character is alive and well, but his modus operandi has changed since Greek times: now s/he's the person who asks "Can't we all just get along together?" when what s/he really means is, "Why aren't you more like me and how can I force you to become so without being perceived as a monster?"

This novel is part of a line of great works of art that show, in very entertaining terms, how individuals are often destroyed by the helping systems that are supposed to protect them. I think of "The Consul" by Gian Carlo Menotti as a similarly great work with the same timely overarching theme. This is not to say that if you loved Menotti's "The Consul", you'll love Schulman's book - but you *might* if you are willing to re-read the book until you 'get it'.

About the humor: Wonderful! but I missed a lot of it at first read because there are so many other things that grabbed my attention. Examples: Eva's riffs on voice mail systems at large companies; and there are screamingly funny sentences all throughout the book, one being something like 'I can't believe f****** Michele disconnected me!' (Michele being a sour and uninformed operator at some unnamed company.) Some writers would get a chuckle out of such a line; the way Schulman writes, it is so beautifully set up that I laughed, in pain, out loud, on the subway, for a long time. People were suspicious: "What is wrong with that man that he is laughing in public in front of strangers."

How can something so humiliating feel so cathartic?

"The Child" is rooted in a set of Gay/Lesbian experience that seems pretty common to me, so "What happens next, and Why" made total sense. That said, Schulman has a whole cosmology that some people won't get at first, even if they're headed in the same direction already. For me, her books feel more insightful as I get older, so maybe they will for you, too. Throughout this book, people throw in the towel in different ways - and only a few of them move forward again. If you care about sex in America in any way, her books are worthwhile reading. DISCLAIMER: This being American, I need to make it clear that I have contempt for pedophiles and that this book did not make me more sympathetic to them. What it did make me realize is that media stories about them are simplified so that they lose all connection to reality and, as a result of that, we as a society lose all hope of addressing the outcomes. That's partly why we in such dire straits as a country.

I took Sarah Schulman's book "The Child" with me on a little August retreat to the northern shore of Lake Superior. I suppose that I could have taken something a little less cumbersome -- although it is a thin little novel, its subject matter and the pathetic characters that populate the story weigh the reader down sufficiently enough.

Stew is a fifteen-year old young man in a dysfunctional family who has finally found happiness in the arms of a couple of men he has met through an internet connection. The two men, David and Joe, are a gay couple who sincerely care for Stew, but underestimate just how unstable the boy actually is. An alternate thread of the story involves Eva, a woman who we first meet in a clinic as she undergoes a humiliating breast examination. She is fearful of a possible cancer diagnosis, she is lamenting professional failures, she is mourning her family's complete alienation from her (due to her lesbian lifestyle), she wonders about the stability of her relationship with Mary, her lover, and she is almost certain that she is being molested by this doctor who is examining her breast. Yes -- all of this is going on in her head during the course of this procedure, and it is no wonder that the activities and dialogue that take place in the room all seem to come to Eva out of some sort of fog. And that, ultimately, is the hook of Ms Schulman's novel. The inner dramas that are going on within the major characters of her story tend to be just as prominent as the external dramas. In fact, sometimes they take over. The characters find themselves completely lost in their musings until something drags them out, and you can almost see them blinking and shaking the cobwebs out of their heads. As a reader, I was initially frustrated with this. There were complete sections of dialogue that seemed completely disconnected -- a character would say something, but would receive a response that seemed to have nothing to do with the thread of the conversation. NO ONE IS ACTUALLY LISTENING. They are too absorbed in their inner conversations. And, of course, that is Schulman's point.

Eva's and Stew's stories begin to intersect when David and Joe are ultimately outed by Stew -- a police detective takes advantage of Stew's confusion and fear and coerces him into confessing their trysts. David is arrested, and Eva is invited to join the legal team that will attempt to defend him. As she and her legal partner organize their defense, Stew's nightmare intensifies. Rather than receive any form of compassion from his family, he discovers that they are totally clueless and even scared of him. They want him out of the house, which of course fills him with enormous fear. With David and Joe out of the picture now, he literally has nowhere to go. In desperation, he attempts to forge a bond with his young nephew, Viktor, with disastrous results. It is another scene that involves loud exchanges, but absolutely no real communication. Stew is accused of molesting Viktor, and although he did no such thing, he can't seem to defend himself. And, this ultimately sets up what will be the tragic ending of the novel.

As Eva learns about Stew through her involvement with David's case, the cruel irony of this whole story becomes painfully apparent. The one person who probably could have given Stew what he needed -- understanding, clarity, compassion -- is someone that he never gets an opportunity to meet. This sad, sad truth is echoed in David's last words to Stew in the final pages of the book. "Save yourself, Stewie." The boy is, literally, all alone. And, he admits this with his mournful response, "I don't know how."

I wanted so much to read this book. The existence of an incisive novel about the terrible unfairnesses which gay youth commonly face seemed to promise the telling of a difficult but necessary story. There is still too much discomfort and nervous throat-clearing around the idea that anyone younger than college age could possibly be gay, or have romantic or sexual urges of any stripe. But despite two attempts, I couldn't get beyond the first twenty or thirty pages of The Child because of Sarah Schulman's difficulty in making most of the characters in this book at all believable. I know she does have the ability to write well and do justice to a character; the inner monologue of Eva waiting in line at the health clinic was sharp and satisfying and fully-rounded. But this only emphasized the strange contrast to the clunky lines spoken by Stew and his lover and his parents and the police and most of the other characters. It seemed that Schulman was possibly unfamiliar with how a high-school-aged boy might talk, and the parents and other adults seemed like caricatures designed to get the reader to dislike them as quickly as possible. Trying to be charitable, I found myself thinking "Well, this is a noble effort for a first-time writer," only to find that Schulman had published seven previous novels.

I've seen nothing but praise for "The Child," and for Schulman in general, wherever I've looked, and indeed the subjects she addresses are serious and well worth considering. Perhaps my aversion to her writing style is a peculiar matter of taste, but after finding myself for page after page mentally re-working every line of dialog I read, or trying in vain to imagine those written words actually coming spontaneously out of the mouth of any real person, I finally, with heavy heart, had to give up.