A tragedy of advancing youth

The first time his parents risk taking him to the circus - in a San Francisco described with wonderful period detail - Max is a child, trying his hardest to behave like a convincing older man. He forms an unlikely friendship with another boy named Hughie, who soon learns his secret and remains loyal to Max throughout their lives, even as they gradually approach each other's age and then, at 35, "continue in opposite directions toward age and youth, respectively."

Hughie is out of step with the dominant culture in other ways that make him sympathetic to Max's plight, but he's honest enough to give his friend good advice. "You have to decide," he tells Max one day, "whether to be old or young, and I think you've been old long enough."

It's Hughie who counsels Max through his lifelong desire for Alice Levy, a desire that's repeatedly thwarted by his strange condition and her fleeting heart. They meet when she's 14 and Max is an awkward 16, "with a gorgeous streaked beard, looking positively presidential."

Given that Alice and her amorous widowed mother think Max is 54, you can probably anticipate the hijinks that ensue. ("How Greek," Hughie remarks.) And while it's funny, it's also painful for everyone involved, particularly Max, who spends the rest of his youthening years feeling like "the widow of his own hopes," searching desperately for Alice around the country.

As a deathbed (birthbed?) confession, the story maintains just the right claustrophobic tone, marked by sparks of profundity in a perfect Victorian voice. "It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy," he writes. "Their real battles take place, like those of the stars in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart."

Of course, none of us has experienced anything like Max's desperate race against youth to find Alice, but we can't help feeling unnerved by the way his forlorn love resonates. Several times, he refers to himself as a "monster," and indeed, he inspires the same strange pity elicited by Dracula or Frankenstein's monster. Racked by their own insatiable desires, these earthly creatures remind us of our own pitiable yearnings. That startling sense of sympathy for Max's bizarre situation is perhaps the novel's greatest accomplishment. It's just the shock we need to fracture old attitudes about age and love.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the books section toRon Charles.

Page: 1 | 2