Perv--a Love Story [Hardcover]

Jerry Stahl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 1999

Set in 1970, in the last, dark days of hippiedom, Perv -- A Love Story is the saga of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old batch of desire and angst struggling to stay sane in a world gone Day-Glo.

As the novel opens, Bobby loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter.  For his sins he's thrown out of school and dispatched to live with his mom, a festive electro shock aficionado, whose condo he flees to track down Michelle, the gorgeously damaged, lasped Hare Krishna-ette he's adored since kindergarten.

Like the rest of their generation, the couple hit the road for California, only to be picked up in a hell-fueled Lincoln by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- smacked-out spiritual cousins to Charles Manson.  From here the trip gets vicious....

Already an underground classic, Perv-A Love Story is relentlessly twisted, sexy, and savagely funny literary excursion, a novel of doomed youth in the era when Flower Power had begun to wilt.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Memoirist Stahl (Permanent Midnight) breaks into fiction with this sharp novel, which starts as a tale of wisecracking teenage malcontents and ends as blazing testament to the human ability to endure pain. The narrator, prematurely jaded 15-year-old Pennsylvania prep-schooler Bobby Stark, begins his saga on the night in 1970 when he loses his virginity. Two older boys introduce him to the local barber's compliant daughter, and they are enjoying her favors, gang-bang style, when they're discovered by her drunken fatherAwho brands Bobby with a tattoo. Expelled from school, Bobby returns to his native Pittsburgh and his pill-popping, alcoholic mother, who's inconsolable over the recent suicide of Bobby's father. Desperate to escape, Bobby spots Michelle Burnelka, a girl he's adored since kindergarten, singing Hare Krishna chants at the Pittsburgh airport. He tracks her down, learns that she is fleeing the cult, and the two decide to hitchhike to San Francisco. They travel first with an eccentric older couple, and then get a ride with Meat and Varnish, two predatory junkies who drug and trap the teens in their Lincoln Continental for a night of verbal, sexual and psychological abuse. This grim, drawn-out scene darkens the tone considerably after the sometimes glib buoyancy of the early chapters. Stahl spikes his protagonist's drug-addled adolescence with sardonic sagacity; his embodiments of middle-class despair (Bobby's mother), youthful ambiguous rebellion (Michelle) and sensitivity masked with sarcasm (Bobby) are lucid through the haze. But when excruciating brutality erupts, the novel goes haywire, nearly capsizing under the powerful horrors. However, Stahl pulls the story together with tender, erotic surprises and poignant emotional transformations. While the tale is risky in its darkness, and sometimes swerves into cartoonish violence, Bobby's honest voice pierces through the chaos and makes for a memorably harrowing journey. Author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

It was 1970. Woodstock was over, Nixon was in the White House, and the Vietnam War continued full steam ahead. This is the backdrop for Perv, Stahl's excellent first novel about adolescence, tacky sex, lots of drugs, and a horrifying cast of misfit parents and predatory adults. The early 1970s provides convenient wallpaper, but this book could be set any time in postwar America. Bobby Stark, the 16-year-old hero, finds himself back home in Pittsburgh after being thrown out of prep school. With the public schools on strike, he's stuck at home with his pill-popping mother and her creepy crowd of misfit boyfriends. A chance encounter with a grade-school acquaintance, a disenchanted Hare Krishna named Michelle, gives him a chance to go on the road and into even more perilous situations. This is black comedy at its darkest--alternately funny, poignant, and neurotically absurd. At some points, Stahl goes over the top, and his self-indulgence becomes painfully unpalatable. But overall, it's a worthwhile trip back into teenage nightmares. Ted Leventhal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (September 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688170943
• ISBN-13: 978-0688170943
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #591,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An intense, smart, cool, hip,read - amazing., October 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Perv--a Love Story (Hardcover)

I picked up PERMANENT MIDNIGHT on a whim and loved it so much I gave copies out as Xmas presents that year. It's so hard NOT to fall in love with Jerry Stahl's smart & twisted voice. I love PERV just as much - think I'd follow Jerry anywhere. Definitely one of those great books you read so fast because you can't put it down, and then, when you're done, you're depressed because it's over.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Startling, painfully honest and utterly transfixing, October 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Perv--a Love Story (Hardcover)

A small masterpiece in the coming of age genre, in the tradition of Bellow, Updike and most of all Roth. After a few pages of Perv, most other contemporary fiction feels flimsy, repressed and cold-hearted.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hurts you to read in the most wonderful way possible, October 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Perv--a Love Story (Hardcover)

Jerry Stahl captures real life so vividly that not for onesecond are you distanced even an iota from the events of the book. Itis an intensely painful and deeply rewarding read and life-altering in effect. If all books were this immediate we might have a better world where people could actually touch each other in a larger and more comforting way.