The Beginning of Calamities

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY APR 28, 2003

First-time novelist House turns a school play into a coming-of-age vehicle in his heartfelt but uneven novel, set in suburban Long Island in 1973. Danny Burke is an imaginative, painfully shy 11-year-old who goes to Catholic school and takes his religion seriously, so much so that he writes a play called The Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Danny's nervous young teacher, Liz Kaigh, seizes on the play as a way to rally her students. But the most popular kids in Danny's class disdain the production, leaving a collection of misfits to form the lackluster cast. Rehearsals are plagued by disasters: the narrator has a lisp ("Leaving Jeruthalem, Jethuth and Hith dithiples thoon reached the Garden of... Geth-themane"); the girl who's supposed to play Mary Magdalene is pulled from the play at the last minute by her mother, who won't let her daughter play a prostitute; and awkward, uncharismatic Danny, initially denied the part of Christ, plots and manipulates his way into the role, forgetting that he has horrific stage fright. There is a subplot about Danny's dawning realization that he might be gay. Though House writes with a sure hand about Danny's loneliness and longing, he never quite gets the novel's comic pacing right. The rehearsal scenes are overly detailed and sometimes plodding, and Danny's point of view is often interrupted with passages written from the perspective of the irritable, twitchy Liz and Danny's Valium-popping mother, Carol, both of whose interior lives are fairly tepid. Finally, the disastrous performance of the play, which involves a memorable act of audacity on Danny's part, doesn't build to the necessary climactic heights. 10-city author tour.