#42 – Childhood, by André Alexis

In point of fact, I finished reading Childhood (or Childhood, according to the typography on the cover) on Saturday evening, but I was out of town, and I haven’t had the time to sit down at a computer properly since returning home. Some of you may recall my enthusiastic comments about Despair. It was hard to imagine, after reading such a collection of stories, where Alexis would go with a novel. He went with the fairly typical first-novel bildungsroman, but his execution was far from typical. The book, as the clever typographer noted, deals almost exclusively with the pre-teen years of one Thomas MacMillan (that’s two Thomases in a row), a young man raised in unique circumstances and raised by a succession of people who are, every one of them, both ordinary folks and raving loons. Thomas tells the story not only in plain, straightforward prose, but also through lists and timetables and diagrams. Thomas has obviously grown to be a most unusual adult, with a life that is almost certainly worthy of its own novel (I would read it), but all that’s offered are glimpses.

In Childhood, Alexis presents us with circumstances and characters that are at a level of detachment I find difficult to describe, but that also have an emotional impact, a deeply touching quality, that makes any summary seem not only incomplete, but also somehow unclean, or insulting. Just read the book. You won’t regret it.

Next: Don DeLillo’s Underworld, for which I may actually do some additional research, because of all the fuss that’s been buzzing about the blogosphere (guh) lately.

August

Writer. Editor. Critic.

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