The Boy

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


Genre: Literary Fiction