Word: wolfs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Kiddie Lit. Specifically, IRDBNGMD is about 17-year-old Jeremy Wolf's decision to enter antiwar work. Should he break the law by refusing to register for the draft? Lacking the true instinct for martyrdom, he decides to become a draft counselor and turns his house into "an underground station on the freedom road to Canada." His dad-having feared the worst-is much relieved...
...inclined as is the ravenous wolf...
Trying to preside over it all is Wolf Walker, a troubled escapee from a Hasidic Jewish boyhood. For him-head still throbbing with Talmudic commentary and heart still wrung by questions of moral choice-the academy is a refuge from his own perplexed humanity. Armed with tough talk ("Suicides are like children. You have to know when to ignore them"), he struggles to give academy inmates a fairer choice than they ever got in the real world. At the same time, he fights off board members who are chiefly interested in getting the would-be suicides to leave their money...
...Player. Is Wolf God? Or merely man trying to spell God with the wrong mental blocks? Either, or both, is possible. Wolf's academy seems a splendid microcosm for mirroring a civilization and its discontents. Unhappily, as the book progresses, Stern slights the academy in favor of a labyrinthine exploration of Wolf's hang-ups. To the useful tale of his youth, Stern ties a string of current circumstances, including a preposterously pregnant ex-wife and a mad film director whose sole purpose is to prove that God, man and Wolf are all prisoners of their past...
...Suicide Academy is left as a palatial metaphor hardly explored and barely furnished. It is largely unpeopled, too, except for Wolf's assistant, a splendidly grotesque, wasp-tongued Negro named Gilliatt. Archly antiSemitic, he quotes upbeat Talmudic texts to needle Wolf, and continually accuses him of secretly sabotaging the academy's sacred neutrality in favor of life. Gilliatt reasons that the Jews invented resurrection and so are rotten with humanitarian sympathy. Gilliatt may be the best bit-part player of the literary year...