American Fiction, Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Motivations - Fiction, Love & Relationships - Fiction

Loverboy

Name: Loverboy
Author: Victoria Redel
ISBN: 9780156007245

by Victoria Redel

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Overview

In Victoria Redel's mesmerizing first novel, the question of what happens when a mother loves her child too much is deeply and darkly explored. Left with a small fortune by her parents and the cryptic advice, "it would do to find a passion," Redel's narrator sets out to become a mother—a task she feels she can be adequately passionate about. She conceives her son Paul through a loveless one-night stand, surrounds him with a wonderful, magical world for two—a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion—and calls him pet names like Birdie, Cookie, Puppy, and Loverboy. She wonders, "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" But as life outside their lace curtains begins to beckon the school-age Paul, his mother's efforts to keep him content in their small world become increasingly frantic and ultimately extreme by all definitions.
In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, exposing the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all types of devotion.

Synopsis

loverboy

Winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize

"Loverboy is a fierce and harrowing book, a novel that precisely charts the course of a mother's love so steel-willed and relentless that we have no choice but come to understand the purely rational insanity Victoria Redel examines here. Ms. Redel is a writer whose stories and poems I have long admired, but Loverboy shows us all just how dynamic and beautiful and frightening her storytelling art truly is." Bret Lott

"Victoria Redel's contribution to the literature of obsession is rendered with unusual delicacy and daring." Amy Hempel

praise for Where the Road Bottoms Out

"Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily." Grace Paley

"A true thing glitters, jewel-like, at the heart of these stories." Los Angeles Times

"Stories like memories, viewed through the thick and distortive lens of time, stories more sense than intellect, more instinct than erudition, come forth in this collection with language that is both sumptuous and spare." Ruminator Review

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Isn t a boy s best friend always his mother? But what if Mom s existence revolves exclusively around the child? In Loverboy, debut novelist Victoria Redel takes maternal love to bizarre, harrowing extremes.

Loverboy is stunningly fine. No Novel has rattled me this much since Judith Rossner s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. More Redel, please, and soon.

About the Author, Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel has published a book of short fiction, Where the Road Bottoms Out, as well as a prize-winning collection of poetry, Already the World. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

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Editorials

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Redel is one of the most talented scary writers to come out of musty old Manhattan in the last few decades. She¹s a writer with her fists clenched so tightly that her palms must bleed, and when she opens her fist, suddenly, in front of the reader, powerful, hurtful truths come flying out. Redel is pure courage, facing squarely, almost formally, simple ferocious ideas: Mothers are evil and human; mothers are suffocating and loving; stupid bureaucrats are wrecking humanity; each person is weirdly different and fascinating; language doesn¹t have to be what you say it should be. All this and story too.

Publishers Weekly

In Redel¹s controlled and convincing tale of a mother¹s obsession for her child, the first-person narrator endangers the life of her grade-school son, then asks rhetorically, "Has a mother ever loved a child more?" It is a disturbing question, since the entire novel proves to be the narrator¹s heartfelt demonstration of her single-minded devotion to the raising of her son, Paul. Beautifully succinct, lyrically composed chapters give occasionally disturbing glimpses of the narrator gravely ill in a hospital room, but not until the end of the novel does the reader become chillingly aware of how she has resisted the intrusion of the real world. Painting a convincing portrait of her complex and surprising sympathetic narrator, Redel (Where the Road Bottoms Out) makes it possible to empathize with the woman¹s overwhelming love for her son: the novel succeeds because the reader cannot condemn her.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Isn¹t a boy¹s best friend always his mother? But what if Mom¹s existence revolves exclusively around the child? In Loverboy, debut novelist Victoria Redel takes maternal love to bizarre, harrowing extremes.

Loverboy is stunningly fine. No Novel has rattled me this much since Judith Rossner¹s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. More Redel, please, and soon.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Redel's controlled and convincing tale of a mother's obsession for her child, the first-person narrator endangers the life of her grade-school son, then asks rhetorically, "Has a mother ever loved a child more?" It is a disturbing question, since the entire novel proves to be the narrator's heartfelt demonstration of her single-minded devotion to the raising of her son, Paul. Conceived anonymously ("I never wanted a house and I never wanted a husband," remarks the narrator, who remains nameless and without a definite address), Paul is his mother's central passion; her own perilously solipsistic parents died in a suicide pact. Slavish in her attention to her son, she does not use contractions because they are lazy and calls him by anything (Loverboy, Babydoll) but his name because she cannot bear for him to join the ranks of the ordinary, school-taught drones. Beautifully succinct, lyrically composed chapters give occasionally disturbing glimpses of the narrator gravely ill in a hospital room, but not until the end of the novel does the reader become chillingly aware of how she has resisted the intrusion of the real world. Hints of her obsessive possessiveness crop up strategically: she secretly euthanatizes a sick baby bird they have found so that her son doesn't have to see it die; she lies about doctor appointments in order to take the boy out of school and off on magical junkets together. Painting a convincing portrait of her complex and surprisingly sympathetic narrator, Redel (Where the Road Bottoms Out) makes it possible to empathize with the woman's overwhelming love for her son: the novel succeeds because the reader cannot condemn her. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"There is no falling in love like falling in love with a child," the anonymous narrator of Redel's first novel rhapsodizes. The daughter of solipsistic parents who killed themselves in a suicide pact, she takes the only bit of advice that they ever gave her ("It would do well to find a passion") and pursues single motherhood with disturbing aplomb. Paul, whom she calls "Loverboy" and "Babydoll," is the result of several one-night stands, and everything is magical between them until Paul starts to take an interest in the real world. When Paul leaves his mother for school and other children, she haunts the playground and makes up visits to the doctor to pull him out of school early. Redel, author of the story collection Where the Road Bottoms Out, writes like an angel about the darkest edge of obsession. This debut is simply excellent. Highly recommended. [Quality Paperback Book Club dual selection.] David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Redel's first novel (after Where the Road Bottoms Out, stories, 1995) strains long in an extremely narrow swath of the psychological spectrum-with results that belabor the tale remorselessly but just don't become convincing or moving. The narrator, a young woman, was raised as a precociously brilliant only child by parents who seemed invariably more involved with one another than they were with her, no matter how hard she strove for their attention. After their death, she is left with enough money so that there's no need for her to work-though her mother has left her with the advice that she should find a "passion." And that passion? Well, it becomes getting pregnant-which she finally manages to do after picking up so very many men for one-night stands that it's fair to say they become a blur. Success comes at last, however, and she gives birth to baby Paul, with whom she becomes intensely, overpoweringly, neurotically in love (the book's title is one of her plentiful love-names for him). He's ready for kindergarten as the main action opens, but his mother keeps him at home for schooling, convinced that in keeping him away from regular school she's "saving [her] son from the ordinary." Well, maybe: she listens to Beethoven with him, sees van Gogh, explores nature, all true; but she also forbids the use of contractions, since they show "sloppy disrespect for the beauty of each word"-and, one might add, make her sound crazy. And thus things go, her possessiveness all the more manic, neurotic-and then psychotic-as Paul begs and begs to be allowed to go to school. And go to school he does-though mom, by now weirder than ever, has a plan that will make everything turn out just perfectly.Apsychological novel with so few notes in its chords-so thin-that the reader can't feel much for anyone in it, woman or boy. Quality Paperback Book Club main selection