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Coming of Age in Zephyr
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19597 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
1,912 Words |
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Maude McDaniel
Maude McDaniel has reviewed for the Washington Post, Chicago
Tribune, Baltimore Sun Philadelphia Inquirer, and other
publications. |
BOY'S LIFE
Robert R. McCammon
New York: Pocket Books, 1991
440 pp., $21.95
Given the choice, you probably wouldn't feel a compelling need to read still another coming-of-age book. And who can blame you? The library shelves are packed with paeans to past puberties, ranging from masterpieces to gosh-awful junk. It seems improbable now that Padgett Powell (of whom McCammon rather reminds me) and Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and scepters of others have had their say, that there could be anything left of the form in this generation.
Improbable, maybe, but not impossible. Boy's Life is an outrageous mix of literary genres, with coming-of-age, horror, small-town chronicle, murder, magic, nostalgia, occult, and detective stories all slung together like a Boy Scout camp stew, and it works as a more cautious recipe never would.
McCammon finds new and riveting ways to frame the traditional discoveries people make in their formative years. Of course, the truths this book's twelve-year-old narrator arrives at are in reality the product of several more decades of thoughtful experience. But that was ever true of the coming-of-age novel--it's the author's perspective that is being recorded in the tranquility of hindsight, rather than the young protagonist's.
All that granted, its important to emphasize that McCammon, author of ten previous shock-type novels (including New York Times best-sellers Swan Song, Stinger, The Wolf's Hour, Mine, and World Fantasy Association prizewinner Usher's Passing), proves in this unlikely, unconventional, and quite lovely "pictography" that you can go home yet once again, and still find a new way of telling about it.
Monsters and magic
The clue to McCammon's originality here is his apparent lifelong fascination with monsters, horror, and the occult. This particular indulgence is decidedly not one of my favorites, which makes my affection for this book the more notable. So, even if Cory Mackenson's life story begins to sound like an indigestible mixture of Tom Sawyer and Jaws, with pinches of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and a New Age To Kill a Mockingbird thrown in for good measure, you can handle it. I
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