Customer Reviews

The Whipping Boy

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What a novel! It has so much. You know no editor got his grubby hands on this one. Don't be put off by the title, which promises kinky melodrama. The book aims for social agitprop, but don't be put off by that, either. I do have one caveat: Beth Holmes has an unstated Christian agenda, in addition to the social one. It's unstated because it's taken as an absolute given. Some readers will quickly be alienated, around the point where the psychiatrist sits down to dinner with the disturbed family. If you're not horrified (as the psychiatrist is) that a father would allow his son to lead the family in saying grace--a permissiveness that is viewed by the author as sacrilege and horrific abuse--you'll probably be bewildered. And--just maybe--hooked.

The novel--about a demented Dad who drives his son nuts, while the boy's saintly mother fights to save him--calls for reform of child-abuse laws, which at the time of its writing punished only physical abuse. It dramatizes the need for parents to set boundaries, warning that a lack of discipline (i.e., spoiling them rotten) can be as cataclysmic as daily beatings. Some good old-fashioned, Christian discipline is what's called for. That's the pretense, anyway. The book illustrates something else: that the medium is, indeed, the message. The novel itself is like some freaky, naive, flipped-out adolescent, totally lacking in any sort of discipline or shame, filled with weird disgust. Holmes gooses her polemic with hysterical overwriting, zany plot-twists, and yes, kinky melodrama, as well as the occasional Dr.-Seuss-on-drugs rhyme: "Timmy was a twelve-year-old [expletive] in lunatic drag." And that's not dialogue.

Much of the story is rather far-fetched, even for a pot-boiler. True, the twelve-year-old protagonist is described as good-looking, but his father can't leave him in the office for a minute without a secretary jumping into his lap. (Naughty boy!) Daddy finds this very annoying, since he likes to conduct nude wrestling matches with the boy on the living room rug. He doesn't mind the kid trying to murder people, including his own mother, and he lets him hang out at bus stations wearing lipstick and a beret, threatening sailors, but this girl stuff is out. Inexplicably, he decides to put the family finances and stock portfolios in the kid's jittery hands and give him total carte blanche. When bankruptcy results, he chases the kid onto the roof, hurling large pieces of furniture at him.

Like little Timmy, you start to wonder what Mom ever saw in this guy. Helpfully, the novel flashes back to the 'fifties, to the budding romance between Dan and Evie. One evening, after a hot date, Dan accuses Evie of rape and attempted murder. Of him. Instead of running for her life, Evie finds his "vulnerability" irresistible. After the wedding, she doesn't wonder too much about why Dan's always going on about her "hard-boy body," or why he enjoys walking around nude in public while, er, "tucked." Dan is so nauseated by women that he can't even look at a drawing of a cow without getting sick. From here, the narrative sky-rockets into total delirium. Evie and Timmy flee into the Deep South, in search of Answers, all of which seem to lie somewhere in Dan's twisted childhood. Holmes can't think of a plausible device for this, so she has them stumble upon Dan's secret Second Home, which is curated by a little old man who calls himself the "Keeper of the Shrine." Inside, of course, is an exact replica of their home up north, right down to the shag carpets and track lighting, except for one room: a weird museum holding relics of Dan's perversion. This room has portraits of his parents and sibs--a rogues' gallery of Irish inbred peasants--all of whom died mysteriously; a photo of the male camp-counselor who gave him VD when he was ten; the steel wool his monstrous mother used to scrape off his sores; pictures of Dan dressed as a little girl; you get the picture. The kicker is Dan's huge, demented journal, which the Keeper has been trying to turn into a best-selling memoir. Yes: the always-secretive Dan hopes to make himself rich and admired by displaying his sexual warts (real and figurative) to the world. Psychoanalytic short-cuts don't get much lamer than this.

Reading this book, you get a creepy suspicion that the grotesque characters are somehow based on real people. You wonder what "Dan" ever did to Beth Holmes. You worry about all the prurient brilliance that went into her fantasia of homosexual self-loathing. The earnest, can-do, social proselytizing makes you a bit queasy. But anyone who finds this book "serious," "thoughtful," "complex," etc, ought to be put under observation. If you have a sense of irony, please, please read this social-diatribe/get-even memoir/Christian sex fable, tricked out in lunatic drag. You'll chuckle about it for years.

This is story telling at its best - a story that should not be buried or ignored. I still have the paperback that was published in 1978. I keep this book, along with the few others that have made a great impact on my life and why this book never made the best seller listing is beyond me!!!!!!

A must read for anyone going into social work. I have read this book over and over again and have never been dissapointed in the story. It is both frightening and sad in the respect that abuse can be in the form of abscured love. The books message is timely dispite the age of the book who's setting is in the 1960's. The characters are complex enough to allow a reader to understand the dynamics behind the bizarre behavior of the parents and children.

This is a truly gruesome story.

This story starts off with a bang. Timmy, 12 is a dangerously mentally ill child whose mental illness seems to be functional rather than organic. At the opening of the story, Timmy mentally boasts of how good he is with animals, yet a kitten dies while in his care. It is never made clear whether Timmy killed it; the kitten's cause of death is equally obscured.

Timmy lives in a house of madness. One of three adopted children, he delightes in tormenting his twin siblings, Nick and Meg, who are eight. Their father is a sexually confused person who insists on parading about the house naked; tucking his genitals back to as to appear feminized and who condones the boys beating up Meg. His initial attraction to his wife, Evie is based on her boyish appearance and body.

Timmy unravels even further; he changes road signs around so as to cause a possible accident; he goes out in drag and flirts with sailors; he nearly kills a man while on a shool field trip which results in his expulsion. The school psychologist and Evie later become romantically involved, which comes as no surprise to readers.

There are a few surprises to readers. One wonders why the psychologist drops in on the Lowells during dinner and why he was horrified that Timmy, rather than Dan was leading the grace. In many families, people take turns as to who says grace, so this singular act does not seem to be the hair raiser that Stollery, the psychologist seems to feel it is.

The main thrust of this book is the psycholgical harm that excessive permissiveness can cause. Dan Lowell allows Timmy to rearrange his stock portfolios which results in bankruptcy; he gives the boy an office and a salary. The only sensible adults in the Lowell household are Eric and Hulda, the housekeeping couple.

Since Timmy cannot return to the public school and Stollery recommended a special program, Evie and Timmy drive around the country visiting different schools. The schools range from state institutions to unsupervised lairs, such as the school in Rhode Island. None will take him, save for the Rhode Island school. Horrified at the permissiveness and excessive license granted to minors, Evie turns the Rhode Island School's offer down. Their odyssey continues throughout the book.

This book is written in a surreal tone - the few interludes in the Lowell house after a long trip; Timmy's piano playing which is reflective of his level of internal control; Evie's illness in New Mexico after visiting a state institution and Timmy driving them home to California; their continued quest to find a school; a side trip to Alabama to discover Dan's sick roots and history and...origins of his twisted pathology.

Evie's offer to take Timmy and two of his friends to a ball game is thwarted by Dan, who insists the boy remain home to sort out his coin collection. That ends in an ugly confrontation with them hurling furniture at each other from a roof. Timmy decompensates further and pretends to be 3 and displays regressive behavior.

From infantile behavior to mature sexual predator, Timmy makes unwelcome sexual advances and sexual comments to Evie during each one of their cross country trips. It was sick and sickening to read this; the boy's mind was so warped and the pathology so thick it makes one queasy.

Towards the end of the book, Dan Lowell re-emerges in Evie and Timmy's lives. By that point, Redwood Grove school in New York has agreed to admit Timmy, but he will be on a waiting list for several months. Dan does some strange things, such as lashing out at Timmy a propos of nothing; the boy is medicated which also does not seem to be a helpful move either.

Dan was a repulsive character and one cannot help wondering what on earth Evie ever saw in him. His twisted behavior has hurt the family tremendously; why on earth she left the twins with him makes one wonder.

Still, readers are left wondering how much of this twisted, demented tale is true. Justice Polier, a New York Family Court Judge who was often quoted in articles in the late 1970s is mentioned. Since she is a real person and the book closed on a "sociological" note by the author, one wonders if this is an entirely fictionalized account. One can only hope that it is.