Customer Reviews

Childsong

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This novel covers a group of students at a small residential college in the midwestern U.S.A. during their freshman year, perhaps sometime in the mid- or late-70s. It will bring back memories of the first year away at school for many, with its universal themes of identity, status, alienation, and development of friendships and relationships, all the while insulated from financial pressures. There is an interesting cast of self-absorbed characters who get themselves into uncomfortable situations, and a variety of unusual literary devices. I found part I erratic, but the pure-dialogue (multilogue?) part II flew and I couldn't put it down during parts III and IV.

Is the current generation of youngsters set for self-destruction? "Childsong" is the tale of a group of friends hailing in a small college in the Midwestern United States where they face the terrifying truth of adulthood where they must learn to survive and cope with the most terrifying lesson they will learn of all - that the world is not all about them. "Childsong" is a well written coming of age novel with a deft criticism of the current generation, a top pick for any community library fiction collections.

This feels like a hidden gem, the kind of book recommended by the smart friend of a smart friend at a stupid party that makes the night worthwhile. It's the kind of book you wait a year to get to and then feel remorse that you lived the interval without the benefit of its worldview.

Childsong slides between Joycean forms, at once inhabiting the nightmarish awe of Portrait of the Artist and the sardonic structural experimentation of Ulysses. There's also a little of Pynchon here--the modern paranoid energy of V.

Thor Polson has an original descriptive eye, and the characters in this book see the world with a flawed visionary angst that makes everyday objects shimmer. But coming through the lofty construction is simple, honest dialogue.

"Hate you? What are you talking about, Susie? I don't hate you."
"If you don't hate me, then why do you make me feel so small when I'm around you?"
"Now you're just being plain silly, Susie... Now you're just imagining things."

Childsong takes murky emotion and crystallizes the actions that surround it in such a way that my own memory of life is somehow clearer... something closer to universal memory.

Read this book!

Anyone who has spent at least one year at a residential college or university will recognize not only the characters in this novel but also the moral and personal dilemmas that young adults encounter as they try to forge their own identities. Even if they could work at figuring themselves out in isolation, it would be hard enough sorting through the uplifting moments and, more weighty, the emotional baggage of their upbringing and adolescence. When they are thrown together and must play off each other, the college experience resembles a battlefield of personalities that leaves behind a number of severe casualties, and even those who survive more or less in one piece acquire scars that will endure.

The college is located in the Midwest in what looks like the '70s or '80s, though the constellation of characters and their conflicts could arise anywhere. Perhaps the time period is less than universal, with a focus on what the author calls the Me-Generation, but it doesn't take much effort, mutandis mutatis, to see a common struggle to assert oneself while at the same time to learn how to live among others with a similar inexperience at asserting themselves.

There is no single focalizing character but Tommy Pendoro, with the same initials as the author, is called the protagonist in the foreword. Even if he is not always the most sympathetic figure in the novel, his endeavor to use poetry to sublimate his frustrations and to give expression to his disordered world raises him in our eyes as the most sensitive of the rather self-centered group. Besides Tommy, we get to know with some intimacy, among others, a strict church-going innocent whose piety is confused with his troubled childhood, an athletic ex-sailor whose sexual prowess is not all that it seems, a brilliant beauty whose promiscuity overshadows what she really has to offer, a jealous stud, a number of beer-guzzling hedonists, a couple of sexually wayward professors, and a hypocritical theologian. Their interaction leads to a few moments of unpleasantness that escalate to a few disasters which, while not what we all encounter in college, represent extremes of what the collection of post-adolescents tends to produce.

The remarkable feature of this novel is its style, or rather, its experimentation with style. The narrative follows a labyrinthine and fragmented path rather than taking us from the beginning of the school year to the end in a straightforward manner. Readers must work to piece together the incidents by determining how each section fits the chronological scheme and how it serves to characterize the students from a new point of view. Several stretches clearly do not portray what actually happened but rather offer a bizarre scenario that tell us in a non-representational manner what is essentially at stake with the students. One segment is modeled on the "Circe" episode of Ulysses (with a bow also to "Ithaca"), a dream-play that describes fancifully what this first year of college involves for our cast of characters. Word play is the hallmark of this novel, some very clever and some deliberately sophomoric.

The author is in full command of language throughout, from the dialogue to the poetic descriptions to the poetry itself. While exploring the nature of post-adolescence, he is celebrating the power and joy of the word.