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Product Description
Who is the boy? And whose body lies beneath a sheet of blue tarpaulin in the basement of a derelict brewery? The discovery of a chilling diary sends Sean Kennedy, once a foster father to the boy, on a desperate search to unlock the secrets of his tragic past and to learn the truth about the boy's part in the disintegration of Sean's family. The boy's compelling and protean personality (he is Devon to the keepers of the Boys' Home, Alex to the Fatman with whom he lives, Priestly to the young rent-boy who reveres him, and Durwood to Sean's daughter) arches over this disturbing novel and is mirrored in the lives of all the people Sean encounters. From these different perspectives we witness the boy's many incarnations, which reflect, aggravate, and distort the desires of those around him, involving these characters irrevocably in his own mysterious intentions. The boy keeps just beyond Sean's reach, then draws him into a final encounter that is both poignant and brutal. This first novel is a penetrating study of innocence and malice ineluctably bound. With his protean sexuality and personality, the boy insinuates himself into the lives of those he encounters. We witness how he feeds their deepest desires, nourishes their greatest needs, and involves them irrevocably in his own intentions. Winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Editors' Choice Award for 1998!
Amazon.com Review
Just when you think, a bit mournfully, that this delicious nightmare of a novel has come to an end, you remember the first chapter, addressed by "I" to "you." "I" boasts of a self-effacement from the story so artful that we readers may notice only "the vaguest scar" of the narrator upon the body of the story. Of so many characters so well drawn, given the brevity of the book, whom might the speaker be? Have we, too, fallen prey to the wiles of the eponymous, much-aliased and entirely shameless Boy?
Thank god the mystery persists. If the houselights rose too quickly, returning us to an unequivocal world, it would refute what's uniquely pleasurable about Naeem Murr's wickedly intelligent tale--its moral, aesthetic, erotic, and narrative ambiguities; a sullen lyricism that simultaneously obfuscates and illumines; a way of sprouting what feel like fully human characters from a yeasty compost of filial guilt and sexual desire. This story--foster father Sean Hennessey's quest for his estranged "son"--doesn't unfold so much as it refolds, reveals, revises a story that has already, in "real" time, begun with a sexual misadventure, proceeded through a series of betrayals and seductions, and ended with a number of bodies strewn along the Thames and through the English countryside, visiting the sins of the sons upon the fathers in a wonderfully Kafkaesque way. If The Boy has a flaw, it is those glimpses of Freud's shadow sometimes visible in the story's brighter moments, but this is a tiny complaint measured against a work whose thrills derive from the terrible astuteness of its psychology. --Joyce Thompson
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