The Island
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
While his parents shop for reconciliation in European furniture stores, 13-year-old Fish Becker is sent to spend the summer with Miles and Ariana Lambert. Ariana can't sleep for fear of who she'll be when she awakens, and Miles is touched, perhaps to a fault, by the romanticism we know first in our lives. While their visionary daughter, Mira, leads Fish through magic midnight rituals, their son introduces him to every kind of excess. Touched by a gentle humor that runs straight up against the isolation of human sadness, 'The Island' is a rich coming-of-age story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of this gentle though occasionally hackneyed coming-of-age tale refers not to a geographic place but to an eccentric Portland, Ore., household whose insularity acts as midwife to the awakening of 14-year-old Fish Becker. It is 1968, and Fish's parents have sent him to live with family friends, the Lamberts, while they go to Germany for the summer "in lieu of a divorce." At the Lamberts' ramshackle mansion, Fish experiments sexually with a neighbor girl whose breath smells of "whiskey... grape gum, onion and garlic and pepperoni," while the Lamberts' daughter tries to lure him away with more occult concerns, including Ouija boards and open graves. Behind Fish's tale of abandonment and self-realization lies the tangled history of the Beckers and the Lamberts--particularly the rivalry between Messrs. Becker and Lambert, which is finally resolved by their sons. Borofka (Hints of His Mortality) pads this slender first novel with such magic-realist touches as circular time, dreams and recurring images (births in transit, train wrecks and submersion in water). The book, because of the paradoxical effect of too much background in too few pages, is thin in places; but at their best, Borofka's vivid, humble word-pictures ("A used Trojan drooped off the edge of the ice-chest like a Dali clock" ) resonate and linger in the reader's mind.
