BY A.E. HOTCHNER
Saturday, December 15, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Ernest Hemingway's autobiographically inspired tales of Nick Adams are, for me, the finest evocation of the coming-of-age experience, Tom and Huck included. The interlocking Nick Adams stories carry him from boyhood to an embattled manhood, beginning with a portrayal of his oppressive mother and oppressed father ("The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"). Nick eventually renounces his Midwestern life ("The Three-Day Blow") and enlists in the Italian army during World War I--his severe wounding and tragic love affair with a nurse are depicted in "A Very Short Story." The odyssey's capstone is "Fathers and Sons," wherein the 38-year-old Nick reflects, during a quail hunt, about his boyhood and his father, whom he adored. Nick's yearning for his father, who committed suicide, is so poignant, so awash with painful nostalgia, that you pause from paragraph to paragraph to settle your emotions.
This acidulous and funny novella begins with the 23-year-old narrator, Neil Klugman, holding Brenda Patimkin's glasses while she dives into a country-club swimming pool--and then he watches, entranced, as she walks away: "She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped." With that, Philip Roth is off, spinning an unsparing yet tender tale about a summer affair between poor-boy Neil, from Newark, N.J., and Brenda, a Radcliffe student who is staying with her upper-middle-class family in Short Hills. "Goodbye, Columbus"--originally published with an additional five short stories--is primarily concerned with Neil and Brenda's tense romance and the challenges of Jewish assimilation, but it is also a brilliant lampoon of the American way of life.
Frankie Addams, a gangling girl of 12--restless and given to a world of fantasy--is the protagonist of Carson McCullers's gentle, powerful novel. Frankie's mother is deceased, her father preoccupied with his business, and so she is devoted to Berenice Sadie Brown, the Georgia family's black cook of many years, whose wisdom and compassion are anchors in Frankie's chaotic existence. But Frankie foresees a new life: Her brother, a soldier, is getting married, and she imagines that her role as a "member of the wedding" means that she will go along on the honeymoon. In her desperation to flee the life she knows yet still feel a sense of belonging, Frankie suffers her agonies with a dream-like incandescence that illuminates the universal passageway into womanhood.
"My father stopped living with us when I was three or four. Most of his adult life was spent as a patient in various expensive rest homes for dipsomaniacs and victims of nervous collapse. He was neither . . . " So begins "Stop-Time," Frank Conroy's memoir of the world of half-mad, lonely characters whom he confronted during his adolescence. It is a story of growing up during a time of anxiety, broken families, sexual anarchy and pervasive discontent. There is no self-pity, but Conroy's remarkable perceptions lay bare the feelings of this distinctive boy, who nimbly side-steps despair to reach a seemingly impossible destination on the next-to-last page: "I was rich and I was free."
Holden Caulfield thoroughly deserves his status as the quintessential teenager of American literature. J.D. Salinger found a note-perfect teenage voice, with Holden's venomous contempt for everything "phony," a voice that the author expertly deploys in capturing all the prejudices and emotions of a troubled prep-school boy from New York. Holden's escapades are both hilarious and painful, as when he decides to lose his virginity with a prostitute that he has procured with the help of a hotel bellhop. When she arrives, Holden has second thoughts about this misguided attempt to grow up and finds himself bargaining with the indignant woman to let him out of the deal. Holden zig-zags through an amusing, pathetic, confusing year, battling inner turmoil every step of the way. But in the end he does grow up--somewhat.