Un garçon maladroit by Marc-Alain Wolf

Reviews 223 in American novels. People drink many cocktails. They commit adultery and get divorced. They are named ‘Dwayne,’‘Susan,’‘Ralph,’ and ‘Milly.’ American novels are the kinds of books that can be described as ‘veritable frescoes of humanity.’ People read them not only in New York, but also in Paris. Quite frequently, their film rights are sold for princely sums of money. Finally and most importantly, they put on stage utterly exceptional and profoundly intriguing characters, like university professors: “J’ai remarqué cela aussi dans les romans américains, que toujours un des personnages est professeur d’université” (19). For good measure, his protagonist here is not only a university professor, but also a teacher of literature, that is to say, a figure who is absolutely guaranteed to galvanize the reader’s attention. His name is Dwayne Koster. His wife has left him, having discovered that he was pursuing an affair with one of his students. She is currently consoling herself with one of his colleagues, which only adds to the loathing that Dwayne has always felt for him. She has moreover taken out a restraining order against Dwayne, having noticed him too many times sitting in his car outside of her house, swilling Jack Daniel’s out of the bottle and listening to Jim Sullivan on his car stereo. Poor Jim Sullivan, whose genius was never fully recognized, who simply disappeared in the New Mexican desert in 1975, never to be seen again. There, we are right on the thematic mother lode of the American novel, for in that genre people always disappear. Whether they transubstantiate, evanesce, vamoose, or die is open to question—but that question is a trivial and uninteresting one in some sense, the important thing being that they are no longer of our world, a world whose boundaries are closely defined by the novel itself. Speaking of the novel “itself,” what we have here is not so much an American novel as a sketch of what that form might look like were it to be executed by an accomplished French writer, gazing at American culture from the outside. That is why the narrator often insists upon what might have been, as distinguished from what is.“[J]e n’ai pas mentionné le nom de Barack Obama dans mon roman” (120), he remarks with a virtual wink, suggesting that the book we are holding in our hands is merely the blueprint of an American novel to come, one that will define the genre once and for all, one that will really knock our socks off. University of Colorado Warren Motte Wolf, Marc-Alain. Un garçon maladroit. Montréal: Triptyque, 2012. ISBN 978-289031 -790-1. Pp. 200. $22 Can. This novel is much more than just a coming-of-age story, it is also an in-depth and poignant analysis of an adolescent who understands that he is awkward and as a result, has developed a series of coping mechanisms that allow him to succeed in his own peculiar way.He is highly intelligent,with a phenomenal memory that he demonstrates in solving a mathematical problem that his teacher had been working on for over five years. Yet at the same time, to avoid the snide remarks and teasing attacks of his classmates, when responding in class, he merely repeats what he has read in books that others have written.Wolf lets us enter into the innermost thoughts of his protagonist, thereby permitting the readers to be in the moment as this sensitive young boy makes his way in the world. There are numerous and highly touching moments, although much less appealing are the scenes that depict the youngster’s sexual fantasies. For example , he does not find any one girl in particular to be attractive but becomes easily excited when, in his imagination, he constructs his ideal female from the various parts of his female schoolmates. Especially moving is how he wants to be able to help his parents, whose appearance is so aged that they give the impression of being his grandparents despite their ‘jeunesse d’esprit.’ They are struggling financially to keep the family business afloat. Having built up a sizable...

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