Thomas Moran (1) (1948–)

The story of the man in the box is so secondary to the obsession of the pubescent children of the village. Is there really nothing else to do than to play with themselves and be concerned with who had sex with whom? I was terribly disappointed with this aspect of the book.
Some of the writing is good. One can feel compassion and sympathy for the main character when an accident happens. But the good parts are so far and few between all the sex that the book didn't become interesting until page 141. If I were to recommend it I suggest starting at that page.… (more)

This book fairly shouts “first novel!” It is yet another coming-of-age novel, this time in rural Austria during World War II. Set against a momentous backdrop and a breathtaking landscape, the story had great potential. In fact, there are the standard mean kids, scary grown-ups, shared secrets, sexual explorations, unwanted pregnancies, and other universal fare. But the novel, it seems to me, builds to nothing as it moves episodically from one stock-and-trade adolescent scene to another, reaching, finally, a chronological but dramatically unsatisfying end point.

Telling his story in present tense, Moran clearly meant his language to be better than typical hack genre writing—and indeed it is. Barring a few anachronistic snatches of dialogue, the writing is competent at the levels of sentence, paragraph, and scene, but Moran does not seem to have a larger vision of adolescence, life, history, or humanity. The characters were not especially gripping, the story pointless, and the situation not nearly as tense as one would expect. So the story wallows in the hormone-addled mundane life of a young boy growing to manhood with no apparent emergence into wisdom that would have paralleled Europe’s emergence from WWII.

Speaking of the hormone-addled life, I am not offended by sexual scenes in novels, but I couldn’t help but feel that the gratuitous nature, the frequency, and the timing of Moran’s scenes were dictated less by a deep understanding of the inner life of the characters than by the author’s sense of the story’s having gone on long enough without another voyeuristic invasion of some teenager’s privacy. Budding as well as mature breasts, be they clothed, bare, or straining against outgrown blouses, were frequent visitors to the story. But I fail to see why, other than as a self-indulgent, nostalgic longing for the days when such things could compete with the Gestapo for one’s attention.

In sum, I would say a reader could do worse than reading this book; but, To Kill a Mockingbird it is not.… (more)