Todd Babiak

Toby is the star of a Montreal television program where he has a segment devoted to male etiquette. After a traumatic experience, doped up on medications, he makes an unforgivable blunder on live tv and is fired. With the loss of a pay cheque, the high-maintenance girlfriend, ritzy apartment, and BMW are also eliminated and he moved back into his parent's basement. A moment of chivalry when he helped a woman who fell off a bicycle has repercussions when she abandons her child in his care. Toby adores the boy who is delightfully pronoun-challenged: "you are hungry".

Babiak, a writer from Edmonton, Alberta, is probably more well-known in Canada but he definitely deserves more attention. Funny, innocent, with much bilingual humour, I enjoyed this book a lot.… (meer)

Adam is fourteen but tall for his age and very fit. Fit enough that he will probably be a starter on the high school football team when he enters his sophomore year, which is unheard of. Maybe it’s not too surprising, however, since his older brother, Jason, was probably the best player to emerge from Monument, Colorado, and rightly won a coveted scholarship to an important college. Adam’s plan is to pursue his grades as well as his sport in order to win a scholarship to Stanford so that he can go there with his high-school sweetheart, Phoebe. It sounds like a good plan, that is until his neighbour, Marv, comes home with a new, much younger and sexier wife, Beatrice. There is no doubt what Marv sees in her, but what does she see in him? More important though is just what does she see in Adam?

There follows a summer of exploitative and aggressive sexual escapades as Beatrice schools Adam like a dominatrix. But Miss Beatrice also has other irons in the fire, both sexually and fiscally. For example, she has convinced Adam’s mother to join her in a property development scheme which will involve convincing investors, and banks, to put up the vast majority of the capital. It seems as though only Adam’s best friend and the sole black student at high school (!), Simon, is unswayed by Beatrice’s charms. And Simon’s suspicions aren’t wrong.

At first this reads like a throwback to the coming of age nostalgia of stories like Summer of ’42. But is anyone actually nostalgic for ’89, at least anyone living on the wrong side of the tracks in a backwater town in Colorado? Something else is going on here. But what it is may get muddled by the eroticism of the lengthy middle chapters as Adam comes under Beatrice’s thrall. Certainly there are themes of exploitation, greed, sexual anxiety, class, and naivety at play. Whether any of them can be fully explored in the shadow of the central sexual story is less certain. For me, the very rapid denouement suggests that the latter themes got crushed by the logistics of working out the knots in the threads caused by Adam and Beatrice’s relationship.

It’s the kind of book a fourteen year old boy would love to sneak off his parent’s bookshelf and read with a flashlight under the covers…back in 1989. Maybe. But I doubt today’s kids will be reading it. Which begs the question, who is it written for?

Regrettably, not recommended.… (meer)