Word: boye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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David Manber's scenario, an unstable amalgam of early Arthur Miller and late James M. Barrie, gives the frustrated boy soliloquies that would make Peter Pan queasy. He calls his dog "noble steed," plays mincing bullfighter to a pickup truck, decorates a barn with painted flowers-and finally floats off to war. But all is probably well. Presented with such a pixie, the Army could do nothing but shrug its shoulders and issue a medical discharge...
...Fowles had it as a child, it was the only sign he did have of his future profession. The son of a suburban cigar importer, he went to an English public school. "I enjoyed it, played cricket well and was successful." In fact, he became head boy, "a very efficient little Gestapo" who punished the other boys with a cane for their misdemeanors. After school, Fowles served in the British marines, which he hated. "I also began to hate what I was becoming in life -a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist...
...businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality tale, a Union Army officer attempts to save the life of a teen-age Confederate boy who shot him during a skirmish...
...lieutenant is an orphan who feels that the Union Army is his first real home, a bumbling but compassionate leader, an idealistic virgin consumed by lust. Catto manages to get himself shot in the shoulder by Martin mainly out of sheer carelessness. He feels no animosity toward the boy, and while recuperating from his wound, Catto fights the court-martial and the subsequent execution with an increasingly anguished awareness of the complexities of life. "What had been a duel, lost honorably and without resentment, became a charade, himself an inept harlequin, a clown in blue...
...impact of the book is a shocking and melancholy reminder that men, in war or peace, always must go on living with an accumulation of such crimes. Becker quotes the real Judge William Martin Dickson of Cincinnati, writing after the boy's death: "But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war? As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all? If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled." Like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Becker's book explores the whole...