It’s one of those books that slip a bit under the radar, but that if you talk to the right people, is one of those ‘must reads’ (I should note that it’s a particularly masculine ‘must read;’ not that it’s a macho book, but it’s very much from a male point of view, with the female being a mysterious cipher, for the characters more so than for the reader).

It’s also a bit of a writer’s book. The narrator is a a photographer, but that artistic career is clearly a stand-in for ‘writer.’ It also engages in a number of literary strategies, mainly around narrative reliability.

To get the basics out of the way, a young man named Phillip Dean, a Yale dropout of a well-to-d0, cultured family (his father is a drama critic) goes to southern France, meets a beautiful young girl and the novel chronicles their love affair. The affair is primarily sexual in some ways, but the young people in question don’t seem to think so, naturally misreading the glow of eroticism and mutual desire for love (or else a jaded reader like myself cannot recognize true, though youthfully impulsive, love when he sees it, which is hardly out of the question).

The interesting stuff involves the narrator. He is older than the ‘main character.’ The preface, by Reynolds Price, says that the narrator is thirty-four years old, but I don’t recall where that number (0r a birth year that would make it possibly to figure his age out) was noted. To me, he sounded older – closer to middle age.

He acknowledges that he wasn’t there for 90% of what he writes about. Perhaps Dean recounted it to him, but it is repeatedly suggested that the young love is a creation of the narrator – the brave self that the narrator is too cowardly to be. The lover, the risk taker, the great mind – everything that his Prufrockian chronicler wants to be but is not.

The book is best known for its treatment and depiction of sex. Their is a certain gauzy, dream-like quality, which fits with the narrator’s relationship to the material (the whole thing is a sort of fantasy for him and even if Dean is ‘real,’ the narrator is certainly filling in numerous gaps with own extrapolations). There is a mention of a ‘sopping cunt’ and fairly frequent use of the word ‘prick,’ but it’s hardly graphic or pornographic. It is, rather, a good description of two relatively unafraid lovers exploring each other sexually. Also, a (shall we call it) tasteful description of anal sex that manages to avoid using the phrases ‘anal sex’ and ‘sodomy’ or any other precise descriptor of the act and yet which still manages to be frank about it.

Finally, I suspect my father would really like this book. I may loan him my copy.